Kobani’s destruction is an opportunity for rebuilding hope
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Version 0 of 1. Much of Kobani today looks like an apocalyptic wasteland. After more than four months of intense ground fighting between Isis and Kurdish fighters, aided from the skies by hundreds of US air strikes, little is left standing in the eastern areas. The hundreds of thousands of residents driven out of their homes can begin to return. But how will they find the strength to rebuild what they have lost? Across history some cities were deliberately left destroyed as a powerful symbol; consider the Romans in Carthage, or even Hafez al-Assad with Quneitra in the Golan Heights, wanting to showcase Israeli wrath. Kobani will almost certainly leave a devastated sector as a memorial, maybe in its central Freedom Square, much as Beirut has done in Martyrs’ Square. Related: Kobani – free but in ruins But material loss is only a temporary setback, especially if something has been achieved through the sacrifice. In Kobani the courage and dignity of the Syrian Kurdish fighters, men and women, supported by Iraqi peshmerga, has been recognised worldwide and applauded. Many will rush to invest and help with their rebuilding. Their battle captured the imagination, with the tenacious nationality identity of the Kurds – what the 14th century philosopher historian Ibn Khaldun called asabiyyah (translated roughly as “clan spirit”) - fighting for survival against Isis, the black-bannered beheaders. Given a chance, people become highly creative after destruction. They have to in order to survive. So many waves of destruction have swept across the Middle East. Tamerlane and his Mongol armies left burnt cities and gigantic pyramids of skulls in the town squares, indulging in wholesale slaughter of settled populations, yet a cultural renaissance followed. So we can look at Kobani and see a wasteland or we can see an opportunity. Music, literature, art – all will flourish in the wake of the destruction, a necessary reaffirmation of the triumph of the human spirit over adversity. Dresden, Cologne and Berlin were rebuilt, as was Coventry and its cathedral. In Beirut, where I first lived in 1978 during the Lebanese civil war, I have marvelled at the energetic reconstruction after 15 long years of fighting. High-rise development is everywhere. In the Druze mountains the plaque of the Mir Amin Palace tells me it was restored first in 1969, then 1974, then again in 1987, three years before the war ended, testimony to hope and the refusal to give up. Related: Kobani: destroyed and riddled with unexploded bombs, but its residents dare to dream of a new start In Hama I have stayed in the Cham Palace hotel, built on the hillock created by the rubble of the old city flattened by Rifat al-Assad’s tanks in 1982. Fighting continues today sporadically and the hotel may in turn be destroyed. In Damascus so far it is only the rebellious suburbs that have been flattened, leaving the families in areas such as Zamalka, Qadam and Jobar to squash into single rooms in the relatively safe old city. On my recent visit I met old friends who have lost everything: their flats were bombed and looted, stripped even of window frames and electric cables. They saw their neighbours killed. Yet they carry on with remarkable good humour, laughing to keep themselves sane. All in all I find myself thinking that the surviving residents of Kobani at least have some solace: they underwent unimaginable horrors, but they have a lot of international support, they attracted the attention of the world’s media and now they can rebuild. They have been given that chance. Much harder is to keep hope alive when the prospect of rebuilding is nowhere on the horizon. The ordinary residents of Damascus, and other cities across Syria, can still only dream of such a chance. |