Ethnic Armenians remaining in Aleppo are increasingly desperate to leave Syria’s largest city ravaged by continuing fighting between Syrian government troops and rebels, according to some former members of their community now based in Armenia.
Hrayr Akvilian, a Syrian Armenian who took refuge in Yerevan three years ago, said on Monday that he and his friends are now exploring possibilities of evacuating them to Armenia without the assistance of the Armenian government and the leadership of the Aleppo community. He said they could specifically seek to raise funds needed to finance expensive journeys out of Syria.
Akvilian said that he keeps in touch with many Aleppo Armenians by phone and through social media. “Every day I get several appeals to get people out of there,” he told RFE/RL’s Armenian service (Azatutyun.am). “People say they have no money, no means for getting out on their own.”
“The pleas addressed to me are really heartbreaking,” he said. “I sometimes can’t sleep at night after hearing them.”
Fighting in and around Aleppo, the center of the once thriving Syrian-Armenian community, has intensified in recent months. The mostly government-controlled city districts populated by many Armenians and other Christians have reportedly been shelled and seriously damaged.
Hranush Arakelian, a local Armenian woman, was contacted by RFE/RL’s Armenian service (Azatutyun.am) by phone as she tried to retrieve some personal belongings from the ruins of her home which she said was destroyed by heavy artillery fire overnight. Arakelian and her family have been sheltered by one of their neighbors for the past few weeks.
“I’d love to come but I have no money to reach Armenia,” the middle-aged woman said. “My whole body shivers all the time. I can’t stand it anymore.”
The Armenian government said, meanwhile, that it still has no plans for a mass evacuation of Aleppo Armenians despite the worsened security situation in the northern Syrian city. Firdus Zakarian, a senior Diaspora Ministry official dealing with Syrian Armenian refugees, reiterated that the government would try to help evacuate them only at the request of community leaders in Syria.
Zhirayr Reisian, the spokesman for the Aleppo diocese of the Armenian Apostolic Church, a key community structure, said earlier this month that local Armenians members are free to flee the city. But he made clear that the leadership of the beleaguered community will not help them take refuge in other parts of Syria or abroad. “We are not intent on dissolving the community,” Reisian explained.
Akvilian criticized that stance, saying that the fighting in Aleppo is increasingly putting the lives of many Armenians at serious risk. “The situation there is hellish,” he said. “It’s time to see the reality and stop living with dreams.”
“Should we preserve the Armenian community in Syria and especially Aleppo at any cost?” asked the Syrian Armenian activist. “No, we shouldn’t. I don’t think that we will ever see the good old Aleppo again.”
Syria was home to an estimated 80,000 ethnic Armenians, most of them descendants of survivors of the 1915 genocide in Ottoman Turkey, before out the outbreak of the bloody conflict in the Arab state four years ago. The community is thought to have shrunk at least by half. Some 13,000 Syrian Armenian refuges currently reside in Armenia alone.