SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Last December in Syria, people spilled out onto the streets to celebrate when their dictator fled. But in some cities, those joyful postwar scenes have given way to more dangerous streets and a crime wave. NPR's Lauren Frayer has more from Aleppo, Syria's commercial capital, which was once a center for the gold trade in the ancient world.
(SOUNDBITE OF RUBBLE FALLING)
LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: This is the ancient gold market of Aleppo.
There's a mangled metal - looks like maybe part of a burned car. There's one, two, three stone arches still intact, but you can see the sky now through the covered market.
MOHAMMED BUNNI: (Speaking Arabic).
FRAYER: "It burned my heart to see that ancient market bombed at the start of the war," says jeweler Mohammed Bunni (ph). He jangles gold bracelets as he recalls salvaging some of them from the rubble and shifting to a modern shop across town.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Singing in non-English language).
BUNNI: (Speaking Arabic).
FRAYER: But he says he's traded one threat for another. The extortion and repression of the Assad regime is gone. But there's been a spike in violent robbery and theft, he says. A gold vendor near here was killed recently for his merchandise.
BUNNI: (Speaking Arabic).
FRAYER: Bunni has installed security cameras and now takes everything out of his shop windows at night.
(SOUNDBITE OF KEYS JINGLING)
SARA TIJAN: (Speaking Arabic).
FRAYER: "There's a lot more young men buzzing around on motorbikes," says Sara Tijan (ph), an art student I met near Aleppo University. She says she gets catcalled more. The same and worse happened after Egypt's dictator fell in 2011. Tijan says her neighbors have had their homes and cars broken into.
MOHAMMED BEJ: (Speaking Arabic).
FRAYER: Mohammed Bej (ph) drives a servees, a shared taxi.
(SOUNDBITE OF ENGINE STARTING)
FRAYER: And he says people are actually going out less, at least at night, now that the war is over. And so this is hurting his business. When Assad fell, the prisons flung open. The majority of those freed were political prisoners, he says, but some thieves got out, too.
BEJ: (Speaking Arabic).
FRAYER: It was also a mistake, he says, for Syria's new government to disband the police and security forces when Assad fell. That happened in Iraq, too, in 2003, with disastrous results. Some of the unemployed became insurgents. At least the old police knew all the regular criminals, Bej says. Syria's new government is training up new recruits.
(SOUNDBITE OF MARCHING)
FRAYER: There are police academy graduations practically every week. When NPR asked Syria's interior ministry for crime statistics, a spokesperson said they actually don't exist, but that crime has, quote, "noticeably decreased" since Assad's fall. Now, I guess it depends on whether you're talking about political crime or petty crime, but nearly everyone we've met has a story of either being robbed recently themselves or having it happen to someone they know.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Speaking Arabic).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (Speaking Arabic).
(CROSSTALK)
FRAYER: In a smoky back room of a restaurant late at night, Aleppo's business leaders are discussing how to shine light, literally, on crime.
BASEL HAMOUIE: We are trying to install lights all over Aleppo. Unfortunately, half of the city is destroyed.
FRAYER: Basel Hamouie returned home from Dubai to help rebuild this city of more than 2 million, which has prided itself on entrepreneurial spirit since antiquity. With street lights across Aleppo either destroyed or stolen, Hamouie and other business leaders are pooling their money to install solar-powered ones. A thousand of them have been installed or repaired in their first week at this. He shows me a video of installations earlier the same day.
(SOUNDBITE OF METAL CLANKING)
HAMOUIE: This is the civil defense, and they are working for free, by the way. We asked them, we need this kind of - I don't know how you call this truck...
FRAYER: Cherry picker.
HAMOUIE: Cherry picker, yes.
FRAYER: Hamouie says, where there is war, there is poverty, and where there's poverty, there's crime. The war part of that is over. And now he's part of an effort to fix the rest. Lauren Frayer, NPR News, Aleppo, Syria.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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