We want you to come to Syria – in peace !
Because of the Western sanctions, there are currently only 3 international flights to Damascus (from Baghdad, Moscow and Tehran), so most foreign visitors, journalists or NGO staff enter Syria overland from the Lebanese border, pictured here.
After a night drive of 2.5 hours, directly from Beirut Airport, we got a short sleep in Damascus’ most authentic and service-friendly hotel, the Beit Al Wali, situated in the old town.
German extreme traveler Thorsten in the beautiful patio of the Beit Al Wali Hotel.
Our plan was to drive by car from Damascus to Aleppo, passing the active war hotspots of Hama and Idlib. This drive requires prior arrangements to get accredited by the Ministry of Tourism and/or the Ministry of Information. For the procedure, I recommend Mr. Mahmoud Arnaout from Mithra Travel.
Because of the ongoing Battle of Idlib, for safety reasons, all cars are required to take a 1,5 hour detour towards the East, turning right at Hama. Our total driving time was ca. 6 hours.
We made a pitstop at this roadside restaurant, picturing President Bashar Al Assad together with Lebanon’s militia leader Hasan Nasrallah. Wherever there is one of the many signposts of President Assad, the area is now under control of the central government.
At the roadside restaurant we met traveling Syrian soldiers, possibly on the way to the remaining frontlines in the Idlib and Hama regions.
We passed this oil refinery near Homs. Most of Syria’s oil wells are located in Syria’s Northeast and are now under Western control, in a quasi-autonomous region named Rojava, or Western Kurdistan, protected by US troops, which we hear nothing about in the Western mainstream propaganda media.
(Rojava: Wikipedia)
Water is another strategic factor in the fertile region of the Orontes, Euphrates and Tigris.
The extremists looted anything, from antique artefacts of 2.500 years of Syrian civilisation (here Ugarit cuneiform writings), to complete industrial factories (dismantled from Aleppo via Turkey), or complete car dealerships (especially visible on the outskirts of Damascus).
But the most sought-after raw material in this conflict was human organs, from dead or not-yet-dead victims, harvested by ISIS and other extremists.
FSA leader Abu Sakkar eats heart of victim
A comforting sign of central Syrian government control, just before Aleppo, having passed about 20 official checkpoints, since Damascus.
We reached Aleppo at sunset …
… and stayed at the city’s Nr. 1 Hotel, the Shahba El Cham, which has always been Aleppo’s safest place for journalists and NGO people during the conflict, although it did receive some shelling by the ISIS extremists approaching Aleppo’s center from the East and South.
The Shahba Hotel provides all creature comforts in this former war zone.
With Thorsten (right) smoking a stogie at the Shahba’s garden restaurant …
… and dancing the night away with the local beauties. Syria has always tried to be a secular country with harmony between the different denominations of Muslims, Christians, Alawites (like President Assad) and even some Jews remaining (in Damascus) and we were surprised how Western or “blond” many of the locals look, be they Arabs, Armenians or deriving from Caucasus peoples, like the Chechens or Circassians. Syria is a true melting pot of diverse nations and religions.
Muslims and Christians co-exist peacefully in Syria, just as in Lebanon, but also in Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Egypt, Turkey. Dividing the two biggest faiths is a third-party strategy to destabilise our societies.
Night over Aleppo. There are still areas without permanent electricity.
The next morning we started for a city tour from the Shahba Hotel’s parking lot, filled with the inevitable bulletproof UN Landcruisers, however there was no UN staff around at this time.
The city is being gradually cleaned from the enormous war destruction. There was zero security personel visible, but also not even the slightest indication of crime or other insecurities. The last incident had been 2 weeks before, when 17 Syrian soldiers were killed, by an extremist commando, not far from the Shahba Hotel. And two days after our visit, 8 civilians including 2 children were killed by extremist shelling close to Aleppo airport.
Life must go on. Typical Aleppo street scenes …
… with school children …
… a poorer little boy collecting garbage …
… and an older textile merchant waiting for customers at the roadside.
Road scene, with the famous Aleppo olive oil, in front of the Sheraton Hotel which has been reopened, but is not officially operated by the US brand, because of the Western sanctions.
Tanks, RPGs, machine guns, mines, tunnel explosions, gas barrel bombs and mortar by the Western backed extremists have left an awful lot of destruction in Aleppo. The inevitable clearing of extremist-occupied houses through bombardments by the Syrian and Russian air forces has caused additional destruction, but was certainly necessary to liberate the Syrian cities from ISIS and all the other alphabet-soup extremist groups, and bring them back under central government control.
IMPORTANT BACKGROUND INFORMATION
The World is More Safer Now – John McCain Dead
Unidentified = Mouaz Moustafa, professional warmonger of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, SETF and previously managing the Egyptian and Libyan ‘uprisings’ for the USA.
Fake? No, here McCain admits to his meeting and the US coordinating ISIS/Al-Qaeda:
This Western-orchestrated war for oil and regime-change (and the ‘refugee’ narrative), importing all sorts of ‘Muslim’ expat fighters from all over the world …
such as ISIS-leader Al Baghdadi
(Foto: azvision.az)
… who Edward Snowden calls a professional actor by the name of Shimon Elliott …
(Foto: humansarefree.com)
… supplying them with war machinery like 100s of brandnew Toyota Landcruisers …
under a fake ‘Muslim’ ISIS banner
(Foto: Wikipedia)
… fed by CIA programs like Timber Sycamore, State Department funded SETF (Mouaz Moustafa), and secret service psy-ops like SITE Intelligence (Rita Katz), Bellingcat (Elliott Higgins), SOHR (Abdul Rahman aka Osama Suleiman), Bell Pottinger (Lord Bell), Bana Alabed (Twitter Bot), or the White Helmets (James Le Mesurier), flanked by the completely aligned Western propaganda media, scripted by “Zbigniew Brzezinski, godfather of colour revolutions and proxy wars, architect of the Mujahideen”, coordinated by psychopathic warmongers like McCain, financed and facilitated by the Sorosites, working since at least 2012 from a secret Western bunker near East-Aleppo (until 26.12.2016) …
… brutally fighting against the local Syrian population, was certainly one of the most perfidious warfare strategies ever in history. (At least for those who don’t understand the etymological chain from Shifta (Kisuaheli/Arab: bandit) to Schuft (German: gangster) to Schufut (Dutch: owl) to Chufut Kale (Krim Tatar: Jew Castle) to Cift (Turkish: double) to Juif (French: Jew) to Ju-Ju (Old Chinese: Avar / War people, “wriggling worms”)).
(Sources: Twitter; US-Senator Richard Black)
The most recent result of continuous Western warfare against the peoples of the world can be witnessed in this sad panorama shot, right in the center of Aleppo.
The devil’s grimace has devoured parts of Aleppo.
Devastating destruction …
… all over the North, East and South …
… and into the center of town …
… here at the former 5 star Carlton Hotel …
… but the worst sacrilege was the deliberate and complete destruction by the Western backed extremists of Aleppo’s famous World Heritage Site, the Grand Bazaar, which was among the world’s oldest and largest souks.
Erasing historic sites of older nations is a trademark strategy of Western-led ‘Muslim’ extremists, not only in Aleppo & Palmyra/Syria, but also in Timbuktu/Mali or Bamiyan/Afghanistan.
The Battle of Aleppo lasted from end 2011 to end 2016.
Around 1.6 kilometers (!) of covered market stalls are now slowly being rebuilt by the local population. More than half of Aleppo’s 4.5 mio original inhabitants have fled the city during the war and are hopefully coming back soon. Those with good money or professions (like doctors) fled to the UAE, those without money fled mostly to Turkey and Germany.
These flags of Syria, Russia and China in the lobby of the Riga Hotel demonstrate the international alliance that now works together to rebuild Syria after the attack by Western backed extremists.
The Riga Palace is another good hotel in Aleppo …
… with a fantastic view from the rooftop restaurant terrace …
… over Aleppo’s old town, all the way up to the famous citadel.
The positive highlight of our trip was a day visit to The Baron, Syria’s oldest hotel, built in 1911, which hosted the likes of Baron Oppenheim (the German Kaiser’s jewish archaeologist and spy who pretended to ‘oppose’ Lawrence of Arabia), Agatha Christie (who wrote her “Murder on the Orient Express” here), Charles Lindbergh, or Yuri Gagarin.
From The Baron’s hotel terrace, the Syrian republic was declared by King Faisal I. of Syria in 1919.
Because of the war, The Baron is in a pretty bad state and has not hosted overnight guests for 8 years, but its doors have always remained open for the occasional historic hotel lover, like us. We were shown around by the wonderful Madame Rubina, who asked not to have her picture published on social media, which we of course respect.
A photo of the last owner-manager of The Baron Hotel, Mr. Armen Mazloumian of the Armenian founder family, who passed away in 2016, at age 63, out of grief over the war. He used to sit on the hotel terrace every day, even when the extremists were just a hundred meters away, and even when The Baron got hit by their mortar (5 times), and he used to say: “When I close the door of The Baron, Syria has fallen!”
Early on, The Baron profited from its strategic position along the Berlin – Baghdad Railway, and along the postal mail flight route to India, plus from its proximity to archaeological (looting) sites, but also as a bridgehead in the British colonisation of the Arab peoples.
(Foto Wikipedia)
See what Hollywood Propaganda and PR can do to your judgement!
The real T. E. Lawrence,
also known as “Lawrence against Arabia” …
… the British spy, backdoor diplomat, hate provocateur and terroristic saboteur (oops, sounds so familiar today!) against Ottomans and Germans, and certainly the biggest traitor of Arab interests used to receive young boys in his room 202 …
… which nowadays seems to be frozen in a somber original state from 1911.
Whoever will buy The Baron from the widow and sisters of the late Armen Mazloumian will certainly receive an entrée into world history books, and most likely will rebuild the famous hotel into a good property investment.
Fine hospitality at The Baron Hotel lasted exactly 100 years, from 1911 to 2011.
The citadel of Aleppo was built by the Muslim Ayyubids against the Christian Crusader attackers in the 12th century and today it towers over a half-destroyed city, watching the rebuilding efforts of a resilient civilisation which can be attacked and damaged, but not broken.
Aleppo (“the white city” – like in the word Albion) is one of the world’s oldest settlements and the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city. The base of the artifical hill under the citadel sits on fragments of Roman and Byzantine structures and even on a pre-historic temple, dating back at least 3.500 years.
This is a recommended documentary about the chain of events in Syria and Aleppo !
(Foto: Jeffrey Martin, Twitter)
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