Last Men in Aleppo (De sidste mænd i Aleppo)

Aleppo before the war

This is what victory looks like

LAST MEN IN ALEPPO (De sidste mænd i Aleppo)          B+                  

Syria  Netherlands  Denmark  (102 mi)  2017  director:  Feras Fayyad                   

co-directors:  Kareem Abeed, Mujahed Abou Al Joud, Fadi Al Halabi, Steen Johannessen, Hassan Kattan, Khaled Khateeb, Yaman Khatib, and Thaer Mohamad  

We all die here together. 

Arguably the best of a recent batch of Syrian documentaries, winner of the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize in the documentary category at Sundance, and remarkable for the personal insights provided about retaining courage under fire.  But if you want to imagine an even more dangerous world, imagine every time President Trump decided to tweet one of his cryptic messages that bombs would be dropped on various American cities that he deemed targets of dissent.  That is essentially what has happened in Assad’s Syria, where for the last six years he’s been dropping barrel bombs out of helicopters on his own citizens, an aerial assault from which they are completely defenseless, as they have no ground-to-air weapons to protect themselves.  The result has been a one-sided slaughter of Syrian citizens, where more than 400,000 have been killed, with one out of ten Syrians wounded or killed, yet according to BBC News reports only 1% of those killed have been rebel soldiers, as the rest are all civilians. While this is the root of the great refugee crisis that has paralyzed Europe, the biggest humanitarian and refugee crisis of our time, with 11 million Syrian refugees exiting the country since the start of the civil war (2011).  Feras Fayyad is a Syrian born journalist and filmmaker who was previously arrested and tortured after filming protesters tearing down a portrait of Assad, where he was suspected of being a Western spy, as are nearly all who study abroad, eventually released where he now lives safely in Denmark.  Shot in the year beginning in September 2015, Fayyad was unable to enter Aleppo due to a four-year military siege where the city was essentially surrounded by Assad troops, but a four-man crew, including cinematographers Fadi al Halabi and Thaer Mohammed, also cameraman Mujahed Abou Al Joud (each named as co-directors), were already in place.  Up until the second year of the civil war, Aleppo was still a world class city, the largest in Syria, with a history that reaches back five thousand years, one of the three oldest inhabited cities in human history (along with Damascus and Sana’a), added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1986, drawing visitors from all over the globe, where a mixture of Arabs and Turks, Armenians and French, Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived together peacefully.  Abraham was said to have grazed his sheep on the hills of Aleppo, while Alexander the Great founded a settlement there.  The city under the Biblical name of Aram Soba, or Halab in Arabic, considered an extended part of Israel, is mentioned in the Book of Samuel and Psalm 60, and was also at one end of the ancient trading route known as the Silk Road.  The Citadel built in the 13th century remains one of the world’s oldest castles, offering Muslim protection against the Christian Crusaders, though it was heavily damaged in the Syrian bombing.  Aleppo is even referred to in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Macbeth Act 1 Scene 3 - The Witches meet Macbeth, spoken by the First Witch, “Her husband’s to Aleppo gone, master o’ the Tiger,” and again by Othello just before he stabs himself near the end of Act 5 Scene 2 (Othello: Act 5, Scene 2 - PlayShakespeare.com), when Aleppo was a Turkish city under the Ottoman Empire, the third largest after Constantinople and Cairo, recalling that in Aleppo he discovered a “malignant Turk” beating a Venetian, with Othello saving the Venetian by killing the Turk, who he describes as a “circumcised dog,” though striking a Turk in Aleppo was punishable by death.  To the British, Aleppo at that time would be considered a faraway and mysterious place, a place where English merchants purchased what are today thoroughbred racehorses.  

What’s most striking about this film is that it takes place entirely within a deteriorating war zone, a place already reduced to devastation and ruin, with people living in the surviving rubble, continually clearing away the debris, where we follow a group of voluntary emergency workers known as the White Helmets whose aim is to work together to save lives as they race to every bomb site, putting out fires, tending to the dead and wounded, sending survivors off to hospitals, while poking around the wreckage and digging through the debris searching for more bodies.  As we see them pull babies and young children from the fallen debris, using jackhammers and axes to cut and pull away heavy concrete stones obstructing their path, it’s clear most that are found are already dead, where they rejoice at every live body discovered.  This is the most hazardous work imaginable, placing themselves at the center of the biggest human disasters, where their work involves precariously placing themselves teetering on the edge of damaged buildings already on the verge of collapse, where they constantly come face-to-face with death while continually placing themselves in harm’s way.  While not part of the film, the White Helmets are the subject of great controversy, as they are the target of a disinformation campaign led by Assad supporters and Russia sponsored propaganda outlets, including inflammatory claims of links with terrorist activities.  To see this, one need look no further than the Roger Ebert film website, Last Men in Aleppo Movie Review (2017) | Roger Ebert, where in the Comments section there are deriding remarks from Norman Brown, Daniel Carrapa, Helga Fellay, and AllWormsMust Die, suggesting the film is promoting fake news, calling the actions of the White Helmets utter fiction, where the gist of it is “The White Helmets are a UK and USA created and funded group hired to film propaganda videos.  The videos I have seen are completely faked and staged.”  In support of their view, they site what appears to be a news website from Global Research (http://www.globalresearch.ca/forget-oscar-give-the-white-helmets-the-leni-riefenstahl-award-for-best-war-propaganda-film/5577778), with a glaring headline, “Forget Oscar: Give The White Helmets the Leni Riefenstahl Award for Best War Propaganda Film.”  On further review, it is the Global Research Center (Global Research - Centre for Research on Globalization) that is promulgating the fake news, as they are part of the Putin propaganda arm designed to undermine Western democracies by slandering and destabilizing accurate news coverage that runs counter to their aims, where at one website (How legitimate is The Centre for Global Research? - Quora), a flow chart reveals Global Research’s place in the Putin hierarchy.  In addition, the fact-checking organization Snopes.com has thoroughly debunked these outrageous claims undermining the White Helmets (Syrian Rescue Organization 'The White Helmets' Are ... - Snopes.com), but to put it bluntly, one can’t be anything less than flabbergasted to see these kinds of comments appear on a mainstream film website known for reviewing movie releases, usually discussing Woody Allen and the like, hardly a political entity.  But the shocking reality is the full extent of Putin’s reach, as you can find examples of it almost anywhere, yet it all appears so innocuous.  Needless to say, the White Helmets are a humanitarian relief organization committed to aiding victims of continued Syrian and Russian air attacks, men who are wholly devoted to preserving human life, and were among those nominated for the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize (eventually awarded to Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia), continually placing themselves on the front lines, where as of October of 2016 from The Independent (Syria conflict: The Nobel Peace Prize-nominated White Helmets ..., check out the scathingly negative comments there as well), they have pulled 62,000 people alive from decimated, bombed-out buildings, often with aerial attacks still going on, while out of 3,000 volunteers who have joined up in the past three years, 145 have been killed and another 430 have been injured. 

While the visual destruction on display is overwhelming, comparable to Stalingrad or the Warsaw Ghetto, with Mahleresque symphonic music written by Danish composer Karsten Fundal that feels entirely appropriate, where the escalating air strikes were only intensified in the past year, the focus of the film follows two members of the White Helmets, Khaled Omar Harrah, one of the founders, a former painter and decorator who is married with two young daughters, and Mahmoud, a young single man and a former philosophy student at a university working with his younger brother Ahmad who joins him on his rounds.  The men are not rebel soldiers, but had normal jobs before the Assad siege.  “The dilemma is our children,” insists Khaled, constantly searching the sky for warplanes overhead, who could easily pass as a Fassbinder look-alike, pudgy, yet gregarious, outgoing, and friendly, with a broad smile, where it’s nearly impossible not to like this guy.  Mahmoud, on the other hand, is quieter, more introspective, as he mostly keeps to himself, remaining terrified that something will happen to his younger brother Ahmad, feeling responsible for his safety, yet both are integral parts of the rescue team.  Similar to a war correspondent on the scene, compiling a dossier of time-capsules, the camera bears witness to the harrowing events, where Khaled is a hero to his admiring children as they see footage of him pulling a living baby from out underneath the rubble.  In calmer moments, we see he is never happier than when his girls are around, doting on them both, cherishing the time they spend together and Skyping them when he’s away, a striking contrast to his life in the White Helmets where death is his constant companion.  The prevailing mood here is one of utter exhaustion, as they perform a Sisyphean duty that never ends, as the bombings never stop, the devastation is all around them, where they are continually racing against time, yet one of the unique strengths of the film is how vividly developed their characters become in front of the camera, refusing to be deterred, lifting up each other’s sagging spirits, even finding humor in the absurdity of it all, but these guys are constantly thrust into the eye of the storm.  Mahmoud is quietly modest, seen talking to a young boy that he pulled from the ashes, encouraging him to make something of his life, while he wants no adulation for himself, increasingly uncomfortable that the boy can’t stop clinging to him.  “I didn’t like that,” he tells Khaled, “I’m not going to visit anyone again because I feel like this is showing off, showing these people that I saved their lives and I’m not like that.”  Dedicated to the core, Mahmoud’s anxiety is directed towards his younger brother, confessing that his parents still think they are both living comfortably with jobs in Turkey, as he can’t bear to tell them the truth.  Normally, we see an overly concerned Khaled tell his kids not to play in the streets, or hang out in groups, as they make themselves a visible target.  When a temporary ceasefire is declared, he euphorically drives them to a public park, where kids of all ages have gathered to play on the swings and slides, with parents finally smiling from the relief, where it feels like an oasis in the desert.  But it’s not long before loudspeakers announce helicopter sightings, urging people to quickly disperse.  While there is footage of jubilant street demonstrations mocking Assad, calling him a murderer, condemning him for crimes against humanity, the White Helmets don’t usually spend their time discussing religion or politics, instead they wonder where is the response from the West?  “All dignity is dead.”  “Why don’t our Arab neighbors help us?”  “Where is the world, man?”  “Shame on the Arab leaders.  Just shame.”  The mood only grows more dire, with shocking footage of a large-scale Russian bombing attack, where any thought of hope is actually a false illusion, instead turning pensive and more contemplative, speaking of their own mortality, expecting to die defending their city. Ignoring facts and figures, which tell only one side of the story, this is an extraordinary portrait of humanity among the ruins, accentuating the inner lives of the participants, as we share acute moments of intimacy with them, where it’s all the more tragic how it comes to an abrupt end, as there’s simply no good way to face the city’s ultimate destiny, where by Christmas the city falls, retaken by Syrian forces, with the aid of an extensive Russian bombing campaign that killed three times the number of Syrian civilians than ISIS fighters, where one can only imagine what defeat feels like to these men who fought so valiantly for their families to remain free from dictatorship while struggling to preserve the last remnants of their city and culture, now already a distant memory. 

Aleppo Before the War - The Atlantic   photographic essay of Aleppo before and after the war, by Alan Taylor from The Atlantic, December 21, 2016

Hell On Earth: The Fall of Syria and the Rise of ISIS

HELL ON EARTH:  THE FALL OF SYRIA AND THE RISE OF ISIS         B                    

USA  (99 mi)  2017  d:  Sebastian Junger and Nick Quested

One of the problems of letting civil war go on for so long is that more and more people get involved.  It’s like a bar fight, where all a sudden everyone’s jumped in and is throwing chairs at each other.  Syria became a civil war in response the violence of the government, but eventually Iran got involved through Hezbollah to support the Assad regime; the Kurds, Turkey, the Arab Gulf states got involved. … Eventually all the world powers and all the regional powers had some investments in Syria.  Once you get a proxy fight, with so many powers, so huge interests in the outcome, it’s almost impossible to stop.

—Director Sebastian Junger on Syria’s civil war

One of a flurry of recently released Syrian documentaries, though it’s more of a history lesson, providing plenty of background information while getting at the root of what started it all, namely a spreading optimism in 2010 arising out of the Arab Spring democracy movements in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, where young people in particular envisioned a better future for themselves, often expressed by massive street demonstrations captured on social media that challenged the government’s hand, toppling dictatorial regimes that had previously appeared invincible.  Even in Syria, following the death of Soviet-style Syrian strongman President Hafez al-Assad in 2000, a country governed by the authoritarian rule of the Ba’ath Party since 1963, living under a declared state of emergency since then, where the head of state since 1970 was a member of the Assad family, including his son, Bashir al-Assad, who was installed as president, yet it appeared there was some loosening of the grip, as some opposition parties were allowed, the press got a little bit freer, and hundreds of political prisoners were released during a period described as Damascus Spring.  But within a few months, opposition leaders were arrested and the government clamped down on any voices of resistance, calling them enemies of the state, reinstating the repressive measures of his father.  When a 14-year old kid is seen writing anti-government graffiti on school walls protesting the rule of Assad, he is immediately arrested and tortured, where we see photographs of his battered body being returned to his family.  Looking around at what happened in other Arab countries, with the toppling of authoritarian regimes, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad decided that was not going to happen in his country, so he actively retaliated, using maximum military force against peaceful street demonstrators, attacking them with machine guns, crushing the spirit of any budding revolution before it had time to spread, where his calling card was leaving dead bodies on the streets.  The funerals of dead protesters turned into bigger protests, with many calling for Assad’s removal from power, but this was only met with more torture and arrests, literally filling the prisons, where one man described the condition of prisons at the time, which were so overcrowded there was literally no room to breathe or sleep, with precious little oxygen, where prisoners viciously fought each other for what little food was provided, causing massive deaths simply from neglect.  An estimated 13,000 prisoners have been executed in government prisons.  Seeing the abuses, many soldiers started defecting from the ranks of Assad, forming local militia groups to defend the protesters called the Free Syrian Army.  While they were initially successful, stopping a succession of government army tanks entering the neighborhood, seen expressing what can only be described as open jubilation, but they had no answer once Assad starting dropping barrel bombs on his own citizens (List of Syrian Civil War barrel bomb attacks).

Narrated and co-directed by American photojournalist, Sebastian Junger, who previously shared directing duties in Afghanistan with Restrepo (2010), this is a film about the eye of a camera, where the viewer sees what the camera sees, compiling footage from as many as a dozen different countries, collected by Middle East news outlets, but also activists, journalists, and witnesses, providing a you-are-there style of cinéma verité, bringing the war into the living rooms of people around the world, premiering at film festivals, but then broadcast in 171 countries and in 45 languages on the National Geographic Channel that normally screens gorgeously filmed animals-in-the-wild television shows.  In an unusual twist, the filmmakers gave cameras to two brothers, Radwan and Marwan Mohammed, who film the reactions of their families as they are being bombarded in Aleppo, at the time the country’s largest city, where they continually smile and put on brave faces in order to minimize the fear of their children who are cowering under the covers, eventually following their dangerous quest to smuggle themselves into Turkey, though repeated attempts to make it to Greece fail.  It was only after the FSA rebels took a military base in Aleppo and freed most of the city from Assad’s army that the aerial bombardments began, barrel bombs day and night, nonstop, on civilians and militia alike.  While the film doesn’t get into it, barrel bombs have a history in the Middle East, as they were used by the Israeli Air Force during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, bombing the Arab village of Saffuriya, causing widespread destruction and panic in the population, where other than a few elderly, the entire town fled and relocated elsewhere.  Nothing of the former village remains, so in 1992 the area occupied by the former village was turned into a national park.  In Syria (Assad 'dropped 13,000 barrel bombs on Syria in 2016', watchdog ...), barrel bombs are dropped out of helicopters, wherever the Syrian president saw pockets of resistance, and could easily be attributed to no one else but Assad, as none of the rebel groups have helicopters.  But in 2013 Assad went further, using sarin gas in rockets targeted against the people of East Ghouta, a Damascus suburb of working poor, killing an estimated 1400 people, largely children, with 3600 more victims displaying neurotoxic symptoms in hospitals.  American President Obama met with Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, along with various allied countries and initiated military plans for a counter attack, including the British and the Saudis who were willing to join an alliance against Assad, claiming Assad had crossed that “red line” warning Obama issued a year earlier.  But at the last moment, Obama had a change of heart, cancelling all military plans, as there was skepticism among international intelligence communities, as well as several member of Congress, with some suggesting rebel groups were capable of processing sarin, implying they could not definitively prove the chemical poisoning came from Assad.  This is one of the major American blunders, according to the film, as that left these communities completely defenseless from unrelenting aerial attacks that continually escalated, feeling betrayed by the West, who would not even provide surface-to-air weapons to shoot helicopters out of the sky, where the number of dead would only rise exponentially, a decision that is at the root of the European refugee crisis, as since the outbreak of civil war in March of 2011, an estimated 11 million Syrians have exited the country in droves to escape the bombings.

Meanwhile, as Assad was busy encountering resistance throughout his country, ISIS filled the void, starting out with missionary offices throughout the country, which gathered needed intelligence information, before utilizing quick military strikes to grab huge areas of unprotected land in both Iraq and Syria, taking weapons and oil fields in their path, which financed their mission, while establishing themselves as a force to reckon with.  The other colossal American mistake was made earlier in the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, supposedly to liberate the people from Saddam Hussein, yet among the first things they did was disqualify anyone from Saddam’s Sunni Ba’ath Party from serving in the new government, including the police and military, basically disempowering them, forcing them to go underground, where they immediately became the American opposition, with many of them eventually joining arms with ISIS, proudly defining themselves as the saviors of Sunni Islam.  One other mistake was for American soldiers to be broadcast on television continually pointing their guns at Iraqi citizens, yelling, screaming, and constantly threatening them, which sent a sign they were not there on any peace mission.  Showing themselves to be expert in social media broadcasts, ISIS immediately caught the eye of the world through sheer viciousness and brutality, posting live beheadings on YouTube, looting ancient artifacts, while destroying mosques or other cultural heritage sites as a sign of cultural cleansing, burning historic papers and books, including works dating back to 5000 BC, leaving no trace of any previous culture or civilization.  In this manner, they instill fear around the rest of the world and dominate the area under their jurisdiction, while luring others to join them.  Using recruitment videos that resemble video games, this appeals to vulnerable young men, as it displays a perception of strength, reminiscent of similar recruitment commercials for the Army or Marines, where young men aren’t joining out of any political or religious affiliation, but for the visceral thrill of action, where they can be part of a dominating force.  At their peak in 2014 ISIS governed nearly 6 million people, but an American bombing campaign has forced them to relinquish territory, where they are on the retreat, but continue to operate in lone wolf situations, reigning terror on a smaller scale.  One of the more shocking moments in the film comes from footage shot by a lone French terrorist, Mohammed Merah, a 23-year old French national of Algerian origin, who is seen getting on his motorbike, where the camera follows his actions as he meets another biker, an off-duty soldier, where they pull into an empty parking lot, supposedly to shoot the breeze, but Merah pulls a gun on him, ordering him to the ground, and when he refuses, shoots him dead on the spot, all captured on his own first person video.  Over the course of ten days, Merah killed three soldiers, a rabbi, and three children near his home in Toulouse before being shot in a dramatic police capture.  This film makes clear that ISIS is not really perceived as a radical Islamist organization, as they operate closer to the criminal practices of the mafia, where all they really want is money and power, resorting to extortion methods, taking a cut out of every profession in the areas under their control that generate income.  In this way, they’re constantly getting a piece of the action.  It’s also interesting that Assad never attacked ISIS, but left them alone, even releasing many of the jihadist political prisoners from his jails, causing confusion in the West, as they were afraid weapons might end up in the wrong hands, where Assad’s plan all along was to eliminate any opposition force, where the choice for Syrians eventually became following Assad or ISIS.  The Russian military intervention siding with Assad only made that clearer, as their bombing targets were almost exclusively rebel strongholds, rarely bothering with ISIS at all, and then only to protect Assad assets, such as oil fields, which generate an ongoing source of revenue.  If and when the bombing ends, 470,000 people have been killed so far, and major Syrian towns have emptied after being reduced to rubble.  One has to wonder, after all is said and done, just what constitutes victory and what will history call a moral disgrace?