Syria Feature: Will Aleppo Rise? (Macleod/Flamand)

Hugh Macleod and Annasofie Flamand write for Al Jazeera English:

On the surface, all seems calm in Syria's second city.

Traffic and tourists might not be bustling along Aleppo's ancient thoroughfares in the abundance they once did, but to a casual observer there appears little sign that the turmoil of Syria's four-month old uprising has made much of an impact on its largest city.

But talk to shopkeepers, hotel managers and traders in Aleppo's famous covered souk and one soon finds grumblings of dissent. 

For in the Syrian capital of commerce, no one is making money anymore, threatening to undermine the key pillar of a long established pact between Aleppo's Sunni merchant class and the imposed stability of the Alawite-led regime.  

"Where are you, Halab?" chanted thousands of protestors, using the city's Arabic name, exasperated by Aleppo's conspicuous quiet while streets in towns and cities across the country filled with demonstrators every Friday since mid-March.

The answer is an interlocking mix of political, religious and economic interests which the regime has been largely successful in co-opting and which have kept Aleppo quiet, but which appear, as the uprising enters its fourth month, to be coming increasingly unstuck, threatening what analysts describe as the regime's Achilles heel.

"If Aleppo were to rise up, it would mean that one of the metrics by which the West is charting the fall of the Assad regime would have been met," said Andrew Tabler, a Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

A student at Aleppo University was beaten to death by security forces during a pro-democracy demonstration on June 17, activists said - the first death of a protester there since the uprising began and a grim example of the length the regime will go to impose its stability on the country's largest city.

Mohammed el-Ektaa was among a small group of students who held protests on the university campus before being attacked by secret police and pro-Assad thugs, known as shabiha, said a member of the Syrian 
Revolution Co-ordinators' Union (SRCU), an activist network in the city.

Mohammed's body was returned to his family by secret police shortly after the attack. Another student was also beaten and arrested during the protests, said the SRCU, while secret police broke into student dormitories making arbitrary arrests. The SRCU member said he had seen one student jump from his third floor room to avoid being arrested.

Students have been at the vanguard of attempts to bring Syria's nationwide protests against the Assad family's 41-year-dictatorship to Aleppo, a city of some four million, one of the largest in the Levant.

'Security touring the mosques'

Though predominantly Sunni Muslim, increasingly religiously conservative and - during the bloodiest days of Iraq’s civil war - a producer of the murky jihadist preacher known as Abu Qaqa, who called for the slaughter of Americans in Iraq, Aleppo's mosques have long been controlled by the secret police of the Alawite-led regime, an offshoot of Shia Islam.

Since its military crushed an armed rebellion in Aleppo led by the Muslim Brotherhood in 1980, the regime uses the state-run ministry of religious endowments to appoint Aleppo's preachers, ensuring worshippers at Friday prayers never again hear the call to turn against their own rulers.

Though an advocate of violent jihad in the name of Islam, Abu Qaqa, a Kurd, was allowed to preach in his Aleppo mosque unhindered by the secret police, until he was gunned down in September 2007 after reports surfaced he had delivered a list of Sunni extremists to state intelligence.

Today, however, the murky relationship between the regime and Aleppo's preachers is being challenged by a message less easily drowned out in violence.

"The people are becoming angrier every week and the government is not giving much, just some promises. Every Friday I feel some worshippers want to demonstrate but I call on them to be quiet," said a prominent Muslim scholar who preaches at one of Aleppo's largest mosques, asking to remain anonymous fearing regime reprisals.

"To see hundreds of students demonstrating, even if they are small demonstrations, is symbolic: They are the young and educated. Some sheikhs [preachers] told me they cannot control their people any more and security men are touring around the mosques every Friday. It's only a matter of weeks and Aleppo will see big demonstrations."

A second, even more significant pillar of the regime's control over Aleppo now also appears to be beginning to crumble as well: the economy.

Sitting at the end of the Silk Road, the ancient trading route between Asia and the Mediterranean, Aleppo is one of the oldest centres of commerce in the world.

Specialising in textiles and industry, modern Aleppo's economy is largely shaped by its access to, and competition with, the vast market of Turkey, just 50km north.

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