We live in Aleppo - Here’s how we survive.

Source: Washington post: Omair Shaaban, 21st Oct 2016

ALEPPO, Syria — There weren’t any bombs today, or the day before. That’s good, because it means you can leave your apartment, see your friends, try to pretend life is normal. Still, you don’t know when the attacks will resume or how much worse they’ll be when they do.

The war here has been going on for more than four years. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled, and thousands more are dead, including many of my friends. My wife and I are among about 250,000 people trapped here in the besieged eastern section of the city. If you want to stay alive in Aleppo, you have to find a way to keep yourself safe from explosions and starvation.

Here’s how.

First of all, to survive the many different kinds of airstrikes, shells, rockets, phosphorus bombs and cluster bombs, you’ll need to live on the lower floors of a building. They’re less likely to be hit than the upper floors are. When a smaller bomb lands on top of a building, it often takes out just the top two or three stories. A lot of people are living on the lower floors of buildings whose upper stories have been destroyed. Many of these residents moved into apartments left vacant by people who fled the city. My home is on the second floor of a six-story building, so I might be safe. But I might not be: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and the Russian military launched a coordinated assault on Aleppo last month, and in the most recent airstrikes, the jets have been using a new kind of bomb that demolishes the whole building.

When the bombardment is heaviest, you’ll start to worry that you might lose more of your friends. Call them to check in on them. If you see them, when you say goodbye, tell them: “Take care of yourself. Maybe I won’t see you again.”

You’ll be able to tell which days are safer. If there are peace talks going on in Geneva, there will be fewer bombing runs that day. This past week, the regime and the Russians announced a cease-fire. But that has made everyone afraid — we don’t know what’s going to come next. Maybe the attacks will be worse than before when they start again. That’s what happened last time. And the scouting planes continue flying overhead, day and night, even during the cease-fire.

It’s so easy to lose your mind here. You might go out one day to look for food and come back to find that your building has been destroyed and your family killed. I’ve seen people standing in front of bombed-out buildings, screaming and crying in disbelief. More and more people have lost their homes, and now they’re living on the streets asking for money. Before the war, they never imagined they would be beggars.

If you aren’t killed by airstrikes or shells, your big worry will be food. Before the siege, there was enough for everyone. But now a lot of poor people don’t have enough money to buy food, because there aren’t jobs anymore, so every neighborhood has young volunteers whose responsibility is to get food and other supplies for their communities. Families that still have a father are lucky: His mission is to get food and other supplies every day.

Maybe you’ll try to grow vegetables in your garden. In my neighborhood, people are growing eggplant, parsley and mint. Many gardens have become burial grounds, though, because there isn’t room anywhere else to bury dead bodies after four years of war. But if the alternative is starving to death, you might not mind eating food that’s been grown among corpses.

People here are suffering because we want freedom. Before the war started, I joined a demonstration against Assad’s regime — and I was arrested, beaten and detained in a tiny cell for five days. The longer the demonstrations went on, the more violent the regime’s reactions were. Eventually, the Free Syrian Army tried to launch a revolution, and the war began.