Before Aleppo became a symbol of the horrors of Syria's ongoing war, it was known for its traders and craftspeople -- a city where Muslims, Jews, and Christians rubbed elbows in some of the most elegant bazaars and courtyards in the Middle East. But a current of grievances ran beneath the cobblestones. The Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT has allowed RFE/RL to reproduce 14 images from their remarkable archive to help tell the story of Syria's devastated former second city and the war that has engulfed it.
Aleppo Before The Fall
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Men in the courtyard of Chalabi Mosque in 1991. After French rule collapsed, Syria suffered considerable turmoil before a 1970 coup installed the Alawite Hafez al-Assad as prime minister, then president. Assad, an air-force officer who had spent 10 months in the U.S.S.R. training as a fighter pilot, imposed a ruthless, secular-leaning police state on Syria.
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The entrance to a bathhouse in Aleppo in 1991. A degree of stability returned to Syria under Hafez al-Assad, but the tactics of his security services were ruthless.
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A courtyard in Aleppo photographed in 1981. Through the 1980s, with repression on the rise, an increasingly militant group, Muslim Brotherhood, carried out a series of attacks targeting the regime, including the massacre of 50 Alawite soldiers, an assassination attempt on Assad, and a bloody attempted uprising.
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A street scene in Aleppo in 1991. Assad's response to the attacks was further repression from his network of security forces. Then, in 2000, Hafez al-Assad died of a heart attack.