Feature: Rose garden in war-torn Aleppo turns into grave for beloved

Standing near a grave in a garden adjacent to his home in the Hamidiyeh neighborhood in Syria's northern city of Aleppo, Muhammad Fahid was reciting verses of the Quran, while wiping his face in grief.

"It's the grave of my wife," he said while pointing to the headstone over a grave at the bottom center of what used to be a garden.

Before the years-long Syria crisis, roses used to be planted in the gardens of Aleppo, but when the ghost of death started harvesting souls during the war, such gardens have turned into cemeteries.

Over 20 gardens have become cemeteries in Aleppo, as the number of deaths were so high, to the extent that people had to find an alternative to rest their deceased in peace.

Fahid added that his wife died in 2013 of a stroke, and after checking with three official cemeteries, he couldn't find a place to bury her, not to mention the difficulty in reaching those cemeteries as some of the roads were controlled by rebels or in hot zones, so he decided to bury her next to their home.

"Every day I wake up I look onto her grave from the balcony and recite verses of the Quran for her soul while remembering our good days together."

In Hamidiyeh, there are two gardens, separated by a street, with both gardens jam-packed with graves.

For the grownups, it's now a cemetery, but for the kids in the neighborhood, it somehow still seems as a garden for them, and the headstones of the deceased didn't stop them from playing inside, especially on a snowy day in Aleppo.

Children on Wednesday were running through the graves, grabbing snowballs and hurling them against each other, as if the graves were roses in a garden.

The spectacle was incredibly out of place, as the image of graves are usually linked to sorrow, fear, and crows, but in this image in Aleppo, traffic was heavy around these garden of graves, while children happily playing with the snow.

"Since the beginning of the crisis, people couldn't have access to the official cemeteries, so they have started burying their deceased relatives in gardens," Alaa Addien Durbas, realtor who has an office near the garden in Hamidiyeh, told Xinhua.

"These were gardens full of trees and after the crisis, they have become graveyards," he said.

His neighbor, Muhammad Abyad, a baby cloth seller, said the garden was called the Garden of Hamidiyeh, but now it's the Cemetery of Martyrs, as the majority of those dead were victims of the war.

"During the crisis the number of the dead people have increased and there was no place for them to get buried, so this phenomena has started," he said.

He said the people started burying their relatives the Hamidiyeh garden, a grave after grave until it was full, so people moved to bury the dead in other gardens.

"Wherever you go now in Aleppo, almost all of the gardens have been turned into graveyards."

Aleppo was among the hardest hit cities in Syria, if not the most battered one, with scenes of destruction filling the horizon.

The city has been carved out between the rebels in the eastern part of the city, and the government side in the west.

After a recent offensive, the army restored almost all of the eastern part, but the tragedies remain, as thousands of stories are being told about the agony the city and its people have endured, and the grave gardens are one of them. Endit