A Railroad to Everywhere and Nowhere
Words and photos by Mia Shouha
In April 2023, a group of us embarked on a 30-minute journey from Aleppo city to the rural countryside by train. Cracked windows framed the green pastures, and the sun beamed down on olive green leather seats and a plastic bag full of lemons that belonged to a passenger sitting across from us. This was an ordinary train trip to an ordinary rural town, except for the fact that we were traveling on a railroad that had recently been immobilized by the war in Syria. The survival of this railroad spoke to the great spatial challenges that Syrians have faced in the decade that passed, including questions of access to country, to home, to life.
We purchased our return tickets from Baghdad Station in Aleppo city to the town of Jibrin. The train station was clean, grand, and mostly empty, housed in a sandstone building with marble floors and arches that had not been used as a major transportation hub since 2011. The station was built by German engineers and opened in 1912 – only a century prior to the war but what seemed like a millennia ago considering all that the region has endured since.
There was some traffic as individuals still navigated the country-to-city track for work and to buy groceries and items not available to them locally. We were mainly locals – a researcher, a professional photographer, an aid worker, a tour guide, and some creatives. Still, we stood out due to our wonder at the significance of this journey. Perhaps the most startling aspect of the train ride was that of the five Syrians traveling with me, none of whom had travelled by train in Syria since 2011. It was either the first time or the first time in a long time for every one of us since you could not travel by train in the country during the war. More than a decade of not accessing many parts of your country and, in many ways, not accessing means to your livelihood. In times of acute economic and financial crisis in Syria, inaccessible spaces form a small piece of one’s inaccessible former life: a life before war. Hunger, overwhelming uncertainty, and insecurity constitute the current norm, but this short train trip transported us to better times and formed a temporary respite.
Among the train stops along the way was the Palestinian refugee camp on the outskirts of Aleppo city, called “Mukhaim Al-Nayrab” (مخيم النيرب). This camp was established near the village of Al-Nayrab in Aleppo and houses Palestinian families who were originally displaced from their villages in 1948. Today, it forms the second-largest Palestinian refugee camp in Syria.
The reopening of Syria’s commercial train lines was widely reported in 2017, including by the International Rail Journal, which announced “the resumption of passenger services in the country’s largest city more than four years after operations were suspended due to the civil war” (IRJ 2017). This was touted as a triumph for local Syrians eager to undo the woes of war and return to a sense of normalcy.
Syria’s railways were carved out of empires. The website of the Syrian Railway Company or “Chemins de fer Syria” (CFS) lists the Aleppo to Jibrin line and others, many of which remain frozen in time: Latakia-Aleppo-Qamishli, Aleppo-Hama-Homs, Akari-Homs-Damascus and so on. The site boasts a grand history as – at the turn of the 20th century – the Ottoman Empire commissioned Germany to build a railway line to rival the Suez Canal that stretched from Istanbul to Baghdad via Aleppo and later on all the way to Bombay (CFS 2024). The railway was known as Baghdadbahn in German. Prior to this line, Aleppo was connected to Hama through a railway built and managed by the French.
Aleppo was one of the most important stops on the Orient Express that connected Europe to the Middle East (CFS 2024). It inspired British author Agatha Christie’s novel, Murder on the Orient Express, which she worked on during a stay in Aleppo (Hutchinson 2014). Christie wrote from the perspective of her character, Mary Debenham, “This must be Aleppo. Nothing to see, of course. Just a long, poorly lighted platform with loud, furious altercations in Arabic going on somewhere. Two men below her window were talking French,” (Christie 2011 [1934], p8). Considering recent Syrian history, this novel title appears somewhat of an omen. This vibrant history underscores the importance of the Berlin-Baghdad railway as one of Syria’s most important hallmarks of cultural heritage. This railroad represented the many ways Syrians have lost access to their country and to land. Older locals would tell me stories of taking the Aleppo to Latakia line to reach the coast. They reminisced that it was beautiful, and crossed hills and green expanses. They would describe it like a dream, often with a smile and head tilt of bitter-sweet nostalgia.
There are so many ways that Syria is out of reach today, from occupation, danger, and exile to lack of means to travel to certain parts or funds to make a living in order to remain in the country. Torn up train tracks, inflated petrol prices and airstrikes on airports, and what is more, since the beginning of the war, is that many Syrians’ whole worlds have contracted. This is evident in the status of the Syrian passport and the dramatic change in access to visas and international travel since the outbreak of war. Economic and geopolitical turmoil has brought the strength of the Syrian passport down to the least powerful document in the world before Afghanistan, whereas in 2010, Syrians had more access to travel, including with visa applications (Esmezyan 2019; The New Arab 2024). Syrian passport holders were effectively stamped with a mark of exclusion and burden. Despite this, the Syrian passport remains one of the most expensive in the world due to processing costs, further eroding access to mobility (The New Arab 2024). In terms of the railway, tangible losses are not the sole focus here, but rather the loss of a rich society, memory, place, culture and community. Today, inland Syrians exclaim, “We used to go to the beach.”
Just as we adapted to the train’s labored clickety-clack and blistering horn, we arrived at Jibrin – the end of the line. There was a rural travel station with a small brick building surrounded by grassy knolls and some trees. We did not stay for long as there would not be another train back for many hours and we had not planned ahead. Yet we felt as though we had accomplished something big. At the end of the railroad to “nowhere”, there were proud selfies and timed group pictures. There was a sense of freedom in utilizing this infrastructure and experiencing a semblance of normality for the first time in 12 long years. This comes with a dose of poignancy, as it forms a snapshot of the limited advancements we had become accustomed to experiencing measured against the overwhelming destruction and loss over the years. There are factors of war: the war economy, the endless goodbyes, the dissipation of friend groups and familial ties like sand through parted fingers. Then there is the notable loss of innocence and softness. All of these crushing challenges and sombre considerations floated to the surface. Physically, the railway from Aleppo city to Jibrin spanned three stops, but emotionally, it circled the planet.
Sources & References
CFS, 2017, Syrian Railways Train Routes and Timetables for 2017, Chemins de fer Syria, http://www.syrische-eisenbahn.de/SyrianRailways/CFS%20in%20Englisch/Fahrplan/CFS-FahrplanE.htm.
Christie, A., 2011 [1934], Murder on the Orient Express, Harper Collins Publishing, New York.
Esmezyan, T., 2019, The Greatest Passports of the Decade, Passport Index, https://discover.passportindex.org/press-releases/greatest-passports-of-the-decade/.
Hutchinson, J., 2014, Aleppo’s Oldest Hotel, Where Agatha Christie Wrote Murder on the Orient Express, Falls into Ruin on Syria’s Front Line, Armenian Community of the United Kingdom, https://www.accc.org.uk/aleppos-oldest-hotel-where-agatha-christie-wrote-murder-on-the-orient-express-falls-into-ruin-on-syrias-front-line/.
IRJ, 2017, Passenger Trains Return to Aleppo, International Railway Journal, https://www.railjournal.com/regions/middle-east/passenger-trains-return-to-aleppo/.
The New Arab, 2024, UAE Top, Syria Bottom in World Passport Strength Rankings, The New Arab, https://www.newarab.com/news/uae-top-syria-bottom-world-passport-strength-rankings.
About Mia:
Mia Shouha is a Syrian-Australian emerging writer from Sydney. She is a PhD researcher in Political Economy and Anthropology with an Honors degree in Political, Economic, and Social Sciences from the University of Sydney. Mia’s current research explores the anthropology of crisis in Lebanon and Syria, focusing on economic development, power struggles, sanctions, and recent agricultural, environmental and industrial history. She recently completed the 2024 StoryCasters writing mentorship and has been published by the Journal of Australian Political Economy and Aniko Press.
