ITALIAN + PHOTOS – http://ottaviamassimo.com/2013/05/31/venerdi-santo-venerdi-sangue/
MAY 2013 – Aleppo, SYRIA
Friday Aleppo is Bustan al Q’sser. An area of palaces that chases each other, from the bridge over the river, up to the Old City. In Syria friday is a dangerous day. A day of rest. For Allah. The day when you gather at Shar al Bad’r to pray, screaming all together Allah is the greatest. But on Friday, Allah rests. While in Aleppo you die.
Today, I’m afraid. Adel is waiting for me at the border with his miny bus. It is the only appointment that I have, I hope to arrive by 11:30, before the beginning of the prayer. It’s been more than a month that I don’t go to Aleppo. So many things have happened. It was established Sharia Court. Kidnapped a friend. Killed another friend for which, of the murder, were blamed and acquitted my best friends in this part of Syria. Which are not here now, because the guilty of the murder has not yet been decided and the victim’s family is thirsty of revenge. The road has changed. There is no longer the great checkpoint “Industiral City Sheikh Najar”, before you had to make a long detour, now you pull straight up to Aleppo. The streets are crawling with people running and coming back from the market. The traffic is exhausting. As in all Arab cities, as in all the great cities of the world. If I had not already been, I would almost think of being in the noisy normality of a Middle-Eastern Friday. From the Turkish border, Aleppo is reached via a road that runs along cultivated fields and rural villages. Gradually from the countryside, you are immersed among industrial districts and housing. Today it is sunny. I’m used to the roar of the planes that haunts you ears and brain, when it is sunny. How strange, so far only a roar in the distance.
The boys at the check points are happy, They stop us, smile, ask me if I’m a journalist, to show them the documents. I say no. They approach intrigued. I show the bag of medicines and shoes. The smile widens and almost always, from the mouth comes a – Mash’Allah, sent by the Lord.
Begin the first piles of garbage. The trash that before skirted the road to form a wall miles long, seems to be greatly diminished. It ‘a serious problem the garbage. In Syria Leishmaniasis is spreading and Aleppo, in particular, is ravage by typhus.
I get off at Bustan al Q’sser, is full of people, the generators are working, shops are open, offering coffee granite, roast chicken. Traders shout the sale of fruits, vegetables, peanuts, bananas are everywhere. Large, swollen, brand Ciquita. I ask where they come from, a gentleman indicates a point towards the area under the control of the regime.
It ‘almost noon. From the front door of the mosque a line of people waiting, stretches up to the street, between the market stalls and cars. Children chase each other not caring of the sounds of war coming from the Old City at less than two miles away. They play, but the look reveals an unconscious wisdom, that forced and ruthless experience that life imposes. Learn or die. Two years have passed from the beginning of the revolution, but people continue to have children. It’s full of newborn babies. In the houses, on front lines, in hospitals. I think about the growing number of suicides in my country, holder of one of the world records for low birth annually. In Syria, the revolution seems to stand on the energy of children, their smiles, the projection of their future.
The prayer begins. You bend the head, bust, kneel, you kiss the earth. The more we are, the more Allah will be inclined to listen.
The Qur’an consists of 114 chapters. One hundred and fourteen sura, a fractal of the period of time between Buddha and Mohammed, based on the theory that human civilization is a function of the geology of the Earth. Five hundred and seventy years between Christ and Buddha and five hundred and seventy years between Christ and M’hammed, that add up to a total of one thousand one hundred and forty years, 114 x 10. The Qur’an contains in itself the mathematical formula of four dimensional time based on code 0-19. The discovery is attributed to a scientist of Egyptian origin who graduated in biochemistry at the University of California, who discovered the relationship between the code 0-19 of the Maya and 19 of the Qur’an. The scientist was assassinated on January 31, 1990.
He had in mind to do a translation of the Koran and he would have been the first Arabic to translate the holy book in English. When he began the translation, he realized a mysterious peculiarities. Of the 114 chapters, there were 29 who had a “mystical letter” at the beginning. He subjected the Qur’an to computer analysis. Analyzed each of the 6436 verses, trying to determine the meaning of the mysterious mystic letters and discovered that you will find those letters, every time that the number 19 recurs.
He published his research in the ’80s and scientific journals dedicated to him a lot of attention. In that brief but intense period of fame, he stated that to be Muslim, you need only the Qur’an. This discovery and the upheaval that ensued, led to believe that the historical Islam was falling, because the same had rejected the Qur’an as text, following instead the invented “Hadith” and innovations of the Sunna. The researcher stated that the Hadith and the Sunna are the Koran, as the Catholic Church is the original teaching of Jesus. In 1984, the government of Saudi Arabia, found and burned many of the books and documents concerning the discovery. The scientist died in the mosque of which he took care, in Tucson, Arizona. Murdered by an Islamic group from Colorado Springs, on the morning of January 31, 1990.
In the Qur’an it is stated that there is no distinction between the messengers. The messengers are sent to all peoples, all cultures, at all times. Over time, all the past messages, include and consume all the previous messages. The Quran contains the secret of the Universal religion, the message of the Law of Time. A message that proves the existence of a mathematics of the fourth dimension and that in fact, in the fourth dimension the number is his real language. At the root of every culture there are numbers 13 and 20. In Sanskrit language, 20 consonants and 13 vowels, in the language of the trees of the druids, 13 moons are named after the trees and an alphabet of 20 letters.
There is a higher and sacred mathematics, based on the 20 and not on 10, a vigesimal system, rather than decimal. The Essence of Time, is not in duration, counted in hours, minutes and mechanics seconds. The essence of time is in perception. The ability to perceive the synchronicity among the twenty fingers and toes and the thirteen major joints, reflecting the thirteen moons.
The old city of Aleppo is a memory that fades as the red of the blood on the rubble that tell it.
A strong bang, suddenly interrupts the talk, smile, immobilizes steps and thoughts, the fast gestures of the traders, looks to the sky, a thousand hands placed on the forehead to see better, to understand from where, this time, and which building was hit. How many children have died embraced their mothers and how many fathers will run from the market to see who was reached, to shout a pain that they will not forget and will turn into revenge. A cloud of smoke and dust rises huge, imposing, majestic. People start to run away, it is the first explosion and the aircraft usually hit twice in a row, at a distance of three to seven minutes. They are MIG 21. You do not hear them, you do not see them. Until the first cries will start tearing the brain and then a deafening roar will cover them and while you run, you open your eyes wide and you’ll finally see it. A silver reflection threads into the sky disappearing into the hell of your paradise. You seek him, you follow him, you wait for him. But it’s always too late. When you see him, someone is already dead.
The target was probably a hospital a couple of hundred meters from the bombing. Women scream resignation and anger – Why do not you come to an agreement? Enough war, we have no more children to sacrifice! – If the explosion had hit the target, they would have died about twenty-five boys admitted with gunshot wounds. It was rather hit a house. Three kids died.
Aleppo lives at night. There is a curfew, journalists do not go out because the photographers can not work at night and are charged for the room, not for the fixer. But as in many other war zones, the objectives are surrounded after sunset. The attack is launched after midnight. You hide just before dawn.
I wake up with rockets lighting up the sky over the Old Town. I’m sleeping in a house far away about two and a half kilometers from the objective of the bombing, the fourth floor of a building behind an enemy zone. The rockets leave from there, the roar of the launch pierces your ears. From the district of the demonstrations, Bustan al Q’sser, some shots of Shilka, the flak. In Libya we were celebrating with cannon shots, the Shilka was used instead of fireworks, because every shot is followed by a red light that cuts the horizon.
In Syria the sky seems to cry flakes of blood. Someone knocks on the door, the owner of the house who lives upstairs, launches into the room with her three children clinging to the skirt. Terrified looks, the children tremble, the mouth open, the hands over the ears, eyes wide open on the window, her mother closes it, I reopen it saying that the glasses are worse than the sheet metal. We sit, we hug, pray, but the voice does not come out and words are whispers of terror, too big, unbearable, filled with the pain of fear and remembrance of the blood of two years of war. Bang. Whistle. Light. Explosion. Tears. The thin veins of the hands of the children seem to explode at every roar.
They look at me seeking answers, another bombing, I start to scream – Allah akbar Allah akbaaaar! – The mother looks at me curiously, I smile, I look at the kids, I clench my fists, arms in the air – Allah akbar, hada nahne, Allah akbaaaaar! God is great, it’s us bombing, Jesh al Hurr, they are the rebels! God is greaaaaaat! – The children lose the hold of the hands on the skirt, they swallow, smile, shake their fists and scream with me Allah akbaaaar. Now at each explosion, we celebrate. And if they hit us? Images of deaths already lived are hammering the brain – if we will be the next, if I will live, what to say to his father? If only one of the children will survive, he will condemn me for having deceived him – you said that we were winning, that the barrels were our friends, that there was nothing to be afraid of. What will I say when terrified by the silence of the blood of injustice he will ask me – WHY ‘.
PHOTOS: http://ottaviamassimo.com/2013/05/31/venerdi-santo-venerdi-sangue/
NUR 