Crossing Idlib

The aircraft appeared above Aleppo while I was standing inside the Citadel.

From up there I could see across a huge part of the city and towards the airport. Below me were tightly packed neighbourhoods, minarets, apartment blocks and streets still carrying the marks of years of war. Then a passenger aircraft came across the sky.

It was 19 February 2020, and the Damascus–Aleppo scheduled air connection was returning after roughly eight years.

I happened to be there to watch it.

Aleppo was in celebration mode. Government forces had just secured areas around the city that had remained contested, and the reopening of the airport became another visible sign that movement was returning.

I also remember military jets circling over the city. From where I stood at the Citadel, I understood them to be Russian aircraft participating in the celebrations.

The Citadel gives you a strange perspective on Aleppo because the whole city spreads below it. On a normal visit, you look for minarets, old neighbourhoods and the dense stone fabric of the city. That day my attention kept going upwards, towards the aircraft, and then back down towards streets where damaged buildings were still everywhere.

The celebration and the destruction existed in the same view.

A few days later, I was on the M5

My trip through Syria continued along the M5 highway between Aleppo and Damascus.

This road is one of the main north–south arteries of Syria, connecting Aleppo with Hama, Homs and Damascus. During the war, control of it was therefore about much more than possessing a strip of asphalt. Whoever controlled the road controlled one of the principal connections between Syria's largest cities.

For years, sections had been cut by the conflict.

In February 2020 it had just become possible to drive the route again.

Normal road traffic and military traffic were mixed together.

I remember following trucks carrying equipment towards the fighting. Tanks and army vehicles were moving along the same roads as civilian cars. At one point I was directly behind a flatbed carrying a tank.

Beside the highway were completely ordinary scenes. Colourful carpets hanging outside roadside stalls. Vans parked at the side of the road. Dry mountains in the distance.

Then another military vehicle would appear.

Nothing announced where ordinary Syria ended and the war began.

Thirty kilometres with the fighting on the horizon

As I crossed the Idlib section, the situation changed.

For almost 30 kilometres I could hear explosions in the distance. On the horizon there were columns of dark smoke.

I was not driving towards some abandoned battlefield from years before. Fighting was taking place while I was moving along the road.

Motorcycles passed. Military trucks passed. Tanks were moving in the direction of the front.

A section ahead had been blocked by Turkish forces, so traffic could not simply continue along the road. Vehicles were being redirected onto another route.

That diversion took me through damaged settlements away from the normal highway.

Whole sections of buildings had disappeared. Walls ended halfway across rooms. Upper floors had dropped into the streets. Shops stood behind twisted shutters with piles of masonry in front of them.

Photographs sometimes make places like this look completely empty.

They weren't.

People were still moving through them.

The tank beside my car

Then came the sound I remember better than anything else from this journey.

While I was driving through one of these destroyed areas, a Syrian Army tank fired very close to my car — perhaps twenty metres away by my memory.

I had never heard anything like it at that distance.

There was no gradual warning that I had entered a different situation. One moment I was driving through damaged streets following the diversion. Then came that enormous sound.

I kept moving.

This is also where the geography around Saraqib matters. Saraqib sits beside the M5 and close to the junction with the east–west M4. During that phase of the war, changes of control around Saraqib could determine whether the Damascus–Aleppo route was actually usable.

A reopened road could therefore become a closed road again within days.

I was checking the fighting around Neirab, near Saraqib. Russian air strikes were being reported there while artillery and other fire continued around the same area.

This was happening close enough that I could hear the war while driving.

The road closed again

Soon after I passed through, opposition forces advanced again around Saraqib and the M5 was cut.

The route I had just driven was no longer simply an open highway between Aleppo and Damascus.

That is what photographs from those days record better than my memory does.

One photograph has the Citadel under a blue sky with flags flying over the entrance.

Another has a passenger aircraft crossing above Aleppo.

Another shows me driving behind a tank.

Then there are the ruined buildings.

All of these photographs belong to the same few days.

Aleppo Airport reopening did not mean the war had finished. The M5 reopening did not mean the front had disappeared. It meant that control had shifted far enough for things that had been impossible for years — an internal flight, a drive between major cities — to become possible again.

For a short time.

Back in Syria in 2025

Five years later I returned to Syria.

This time the political situation was completely different. Bashar al-Assad's government had fallen in December 2024 and Syria was under new transitional authorities.

I was returning to some of the same country, but not to the same Syria.

That will be another story.

For more from this journey, continue through my best travel experiences — or see the UNESCO sites in Syria.