Aleppo

Overview

Aleppo is a major city in northern Syria and a longstanding commercial and military center. Its position on routes between the Mediterranean coast, the Syrian interior and lands farther east gave control of the city importance beyond its boundaries. The road network connecting Aleppo with Damascus, Latakia and northern Syria became especially consequential during the Syrian civil war. Aleppo was also a center of Jewish scholarship and worship for many centuries. War divided its neighborhoods, devastated civilian life and made the city a focus of intervention by Russia, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Iran-backed armed groups.

Before the civil war, Aleppo had about 2.5 million residents. Sunni Arabs formed a large majority, while Kurds formed a substantial community. Christians accounted for roughly 10 percent of the population when the war began, about half of them Armenian. Tens of thousands of Alawites also lived in the city, many having arrived from the coastal region as civil servants or military personnel. These communities did not form two uniform wartime camps. Established western districts, poorer eastern neighborhoods and Kurdish districts differed in class, local interests and political alignment. Those divisions shaped the battle as much as religious identity did.

Geography

Aleppo’s strategic importance rests partly on its place within northern Syria’s road system. Routes from the coast through Jisr al-Shughur led toward the city, while roads south connected it to the corridor through Homs and Damascus. The summit of Nabi Younes overlooked the principal route linking Latakia, Jisr al-Shughur and Aleppo, making control of the coastal approach militarily valuable. North of the city, the Azaz–Jarabulus belt served as a gateway to Aleppo during the civil war and became a focus of competing Kurdish and other armed forces.

Geography also shaped the fighting inside Aleppo. The northern Castello Road was a crucial connection between eastern districts and areas outside the city. Ramouseh, southwest of the center, offered another possible passage when that northern connection was cut. Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiyeh are Kurdish-majority neighborhoods whose location gave Kurdish forces a distinct position in struggles involving the city’s other armed groups. Aleppo’s wartime map therefore reflected both supply routes and the different communities living along them.

Ancient and biblical history

Aleppo’s long urban history made it a major center through successive ancient and medieval periods. Aram-Ẓoba became a name used for the city in Jewish tradition. A tradition concerning the beginnings of its Jewish community associates it with Joab ben Zeruiah, a commander in the time of King David, and credits him with founding its great synagogue. That account is a historical tradition, while continuous Jewish settlement in Aleppo from Roman times into the modern era is separately documented. The community’s longevity made Aleppo one of the principal centers of Jewish life in Syria.

Jews lived in a separate quarter before the Muslim conquest of 636. During the Muslim period, the quarter was known as Mahal al-Yahud. In medieval Aleppo it extended to the city wall and Bab al-Yahud, the Jewish Gate, which was called Bab al-Naṣr, or Victory Gate, from the late twelfth century. The quarter’s gates and synagogues were part of a durable communal landscape. They also record that Jews maintained their institutions within a city whose rulers and laws changed repeatedly.

Jewish history

Aleppo’s oldest Jewish building was Kanisat Mutakal, a synagogue built in the fourth century in the northeastern Parafara quarter. The ancient section of the great synagogue was built during the Byzantine period and bears an inscription dated 834. The synagogue later housed the Aleppo Codex, an important manuscript of the Hebrew Bible kept there for many years before the anti-Jewish violence of 1947. Together, the buildings and the codex attest to the community’s sustained religious and scholarly life.

Aleppo’s Jewish scholars wrote on halakha, biblical interpretation, liturgy and Kabbalah. Baruch ben Isaac served as a rabbi in the city in the second half of the eleventh century and wrote commentaries on the Gemara. A letter sent from a Jewish scholar in Raqqa to Cairo in the late twelfth century described contacts with Aleppo’s Jews and conveyed greetings to Maimonides. The Hebrew poet Judah al-Harizi later described physicians and officials in the communities of Aleppo and Damascus. These connections placed Aleppo within a wider network of Jewish learning and trade.

Jewish prosperity varied over time and did not mean legal equality under Muslim rule. Around 1600, the traveler Texieira estimated that Aleppo had about 1,000 Jewish families, many of them wealthy. Jews served as chief customs officers from the 1520s to the mid-seventeenth century. Yet a 1672 census recorded 380 Jews who paid jizya, the tax imposed on dhimmis under Islamic rule; 73 were recorded as being of Spanish origin. The dhimmi status of Jews and Christians carried legal subordination. Aleppo’s documented scholarship and commercial success therefore coexisted with restrictions on the community.

Jews made up about five percent of Aleppo’s population during the Ottoman period. In the nineteenth century, members of the Picciotto family and other European Jews served as consular representatives, while British consuls protected local Jews. The community also faced blood libels: three occurred between 1841 and 1860. In 1853, a Greek-Catholic patriarch accused Jews of abducting a Christian boy for ritual purposes. The accusation was a blood libel, not evidence of a crime. Accounts from 1931 and 1934 subsequently documented impoverishment among Aleppo’s Jews, showing that the condition of the community cannot be reduced to its earlier mercantile prominence.

Jewish departures to the Land of Israel preceded the establishment of the State of Israel. In the 1940s, many Aleppo Jews traveled through Aliyah Bet, the movement that brought Jews to the Land of Israel despite immigration restrictions. Deteriorating political and economic conditions led 510 Jews to leave Aleppo in 1944; many children and young men followed in 1945. Police accused community leader Rachmo Nechmad of helping secret emigration. These departures formed part of a longer movement of Jews through regional transit points, including Beirut, and show that emigration had begun before the decisive violence of 1947.

After the 1947 partition declaration, Arab mobs attacked Aleppo’s Jews. The 1947 anti-Jewish riots in Aleppo devastated a community with roots extending back more than two millennia. Accounts describe scores of Jews killed and more than 200 homes, shops and synagogues destroyed or damaged. The violence struck places of worship and communal records as well as private property. Thousands fled, and the riots became a turning point in the end of Aleppo’s historic Jewish community. The Aleppo Codex had been housed in the great synagogue before the attacks and was later taken to Israel.

Modern history

After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, France divided its mandate into Great Lebanon and separate administrations centered on Damascus, Aleppo and Latakia. In 1925 it unified the states of Aleppo and Damascus as the State of Syria. Aleppo remained a major northern center through later changes of government. Under the Assad family’s rule, the city’s position on the route from Damascus made it important to state control. In 1980, before the Hama massacre, Hafez al-Assad’s army isolated an anti-regime center in Aleppo.

Rebel forces entered Aleppo in July 2012, beginning a prolonged battle that divided the city. Government forces held much of the west, while rebel groups held eastern districts; Kurdish forces maintained a separate position in Sheikh Maqsoud and fought rebel groups during the civil war. The battle’s social geography mattered. Established western neighborhoods, poorer eastern areas and the Kurdish district had distinct interests, so wartime loyalties cannot be described as a clean division by sect. Outside the city, Kurdish political and armed groups also sought control of routes linking their areas around Kobani and Afrin to Sheikh Maqsoud.

The war brought a succession of armed actors to Aleppo. On February 6, 2014, the Al-Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch, attacked an Aleppo prison with a truck bomb driven by British jihadi Abdul Waheed Majid. He had followed the Tripoli-based cleric Omar Bakri Muhammad. Elsewhere in northern Syria, the Islamic State contested approaches to Aleppo, while displaced people from Aleppo province moved into areas including Raqqa. After losing much of the Badia in May 2015, Assad’s forces built an approximately 800-kilometer defense line from Aleppo toward Jabal al-Druze against Islamic State offensives.

Russia’s intervention in September 2015 intensified fighting around Aleppo alongside Assad’s army and Iran-backed militias. Qasem Soleimani had traveled to Moscow that summer to recruit Russian military intervention and personally commanded the battle for Aleppo in December 2015. He appeared with fighters from Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba at al-Hader, south of the city, in November. Hossein Hamadani, a commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, died in the battle area in 2015, and Basij fighters from Tehran Province were among those killed near Aleppo. These deployments made the fighting a coalition campaign, rather than an operation by Syria’s army alone.

In 2016, control of supply roads became central to the siege. Rebel-held eastern Aleppo lost its Castello Road connection to the outside on July 28. Rebels arriving from Idlib opened a corridor through Ramouseh in August and linked up with forces besieged in the east. Russian bombardment made the new route difficult to use and then unusable. Roughly 250,000 people lived in eastern Aleppo at the time, while about 800,000 civilians lived in the west. On August 9, Hezbollah’s Radwan battalion and 2,000 fighters from Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba arrived to help close the Ramouseh corridor.

Assad’s forces recaptured Aleppo in 2016 with military support from Russia, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the terrorist organization Hezbollah and other allied militias. Russian warplanes and Assad’s artillery indiscriminately bombarded civilians in besieged areas during the campaign. The fighting also imposed losses on Assad’s coalition: recorded deaths during an offensive near Aleppo in February included 32 Iranians, nine Lebanese, four Afghans and three Pakistanis. At Khan Touman in May, at least 22 Iranians, ten Lebanese and three Afghans fighting with that coalition were killed. Iran-backed formations, including the Pakistani Liwa Zainabiyoun, formed part of the wider foreign militia presence in the Aleppo area.

Security

The recapture of eastern Aleppo did not end outside military influence. Established on February 27, 2017, the Aleppo Defenders Legion brought together local militias backed by the IRGC’s Quds Force. The IRGC helped establish the group and supplied salaries, equipment and logistical assistance. Some recruits were assured that militia service would satisfy their mandatory Syrian army obligation. Members were sent to closed camps in Iran for instruction in combat, civil defense, mine clearance, rapid intervention and riot control. The legion linked local security activity to the Iranian regime’s military network.

Aleppo also remained part of regional arms routes. During a two-week period in 2023, Israeli strikes repeatedly put the Aleppo and Damascus airports out of service, disrupting routes used to arm the Iranian regime’s partners. Israel’s subsequent blows against that regime and its proxy network weakened support for Assad as a new rebel offensive developed in 2024. The city’s airports, roads and militia infrastructure had thus kept Aleppo strategically important after the main battle for its eastern districts ended.

Before that offensive, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham governed territory in northern Idlib and western Aleppo governorates. In November 2024 it led a rebel advance that captured dozens of villages and entered Aleppo as Assad’s forces retreated. HTS-led forces took the city, reversing the outcome of the 2016 battle. Opposition forces then captured Hama and Homs before taking Damascus in December 2024, bringing about the fall of the Assad regime. Aleppo’s rapid loss exposed how far Assad’s military position and external support had weakened.

Present day

After Assad’s fall, Aleppo’s Kurdish-majority neighborhoods remained a focus of security disputes. A March 10, 2025 agreement between Ahmed al-Sharaa and Mazloum Abdi provided for integrating the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces into Syrian state institutions. Under a separate April 1 deal, the SDF formally withdrew from Aleppo city, joint security checkpoints were arranged, and a prisoner exchange took place. The wider integration agreement made little tangible progress before its end-of-2025 implementation deadline.

On October 6, 2025, local Kurdish fighters and government-aligned security forces clashed in Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiyeh. Syrian troops and SDF units were drawn into the confrontation. A United States-mediated ceasefire followed on October 7, when Aleppo Governor Azzam al Gharib announced that fighting in the neighborhoods had stopped. The ceasefire addressed the immediate clash but did not settle the stalled integration talks or the security arrangements governing the districts.

Fighting resumed in January 2026. Units of the Syrian Army surrounded Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiyeh after clashes with Kurdish-led forces. On January 7, the army declared the neighborhoods closed military zones and warned civilians to stay away from SDF positions. The renewed confrontation followed the failure to implement the March 2025 agreement by its deadline. Aleppo remained a test of whether Syria’s new authorities and Kurdish forces could establish a durable arrangement without renewed urban warfare and civilian displacement.