Bachar Al-Assad has just visited Aleppo for the first time since the reconquest, in 2016, of this bastion of the revolutionary insurrection. The Syrian leader was accompanied by his wife and their three children. The eldest, named Hafez after his grandfather, the founder of the Assad dynasty, is, despite his 21 years, already presented as the designated heir. The Syrian dictator even briefly visited the Umayyad Mosque in Aleppo, whose iconic minaret, the target of a government bombardment in 2013, still lies in the rubble. Because the reconstruction of the country remains very laborious, the regime refusing to rehabilitate the formerly rebellious districts. The goal is, in the ruins of Syria, to recall what it costs to oppose the despot, but also to avoid encouraging a possible return of potentially protesting refugees.
Located a few kilometers south of Damascus, the suburb of Hajar Al-Aswad takes its name from the ” Black stone “ which would have been placed by the prophet Mohammed himself in one of the corners of the Kaaba, the holiest of holies of Islam in Mecca. This disadvantaged neighborhood has historically been populated by Syrian refugees, expelled in 1967 from the Golan Heights, during the Israeli occupation of these strategic heights. In a community of exile and poverty, he was flanked to the north by the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk, which, like him, became in 2012 a stronghold of resistance to the Assad regime.
While Yarmouk suffered a ruthless siege in 2013-15, in which almost two hundred civilians starved to death, Hajar al-Aswad was the scene of fierce fighting, first between the regime and the insurgents, then between these and the jihadists of Daesh, finally masters of the area, until being expelled from it in 2018. These cycles of clashes left Hajar al-Aswad in ruins, a desolation that the Assad regime left practically in the state.
Profitable captagon traffic
The Syrian despot indeed continues to be less concerned with the fate of his compatriots than with the exploitation of the resources essential to the preservation of his regime. The embezzlement of international aid to the population, which has been a major driver of such preservation, is now less lucrative for the Assads than the trafficking of captagon, this amphetamine of which the regime has become the main producer in the Middle East.
But the Syrian dictatorship, always inventive when it comes to generating new revenue, is now exploiting the windfall of the ruins it has itself caused. Hajar Al-Aswad’s end-of-the-world setting has indeed seduced Jackie Chan himself, to the point that the Hong Kong kung-fu star, who has become one of the most prominent producers in Beijing, decided to shoot his next big budget movie.
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