Parts of Aleppo‘s historic souk, or marketplace, have been burnt to the ground. The storied Sissi House, one of the region’s finest restaurants and famous for its tasty cherry lamb kebabs, has reportedly burnt down. Dar Zamaria, part of a wave of chic boutique hotels being carved out of Ottoman merchant houses (and which I reviewed for the New York Times in 2009), has also reportedly been destroyed. We are witnessing a sectarian civil war, and the dreadful human carnage that comes with it. We may also be witnessing the destruction of a way of life that’s evolved over centuries around one of the Arab world‘s architectural treasures.
If the West is not going to intervene in Syria, it should at least do more to prevent this UNESCO-protected site — a city that lays claim to being among the world’s oldest — from becoming a 21st-century version of Dresden.
looking beyond borders 