The tiny, honey-coloured Al-Shuwaibiya Mosque is the oldest in Aleppo and one of the few that remains undamaged. Unlike many, its low minaret is protected by surrounding buildings and still stands; its 12th century inscriptions intact.
Here his young sons and neighbours said prayers for Khaled Qarabili, who lived in nearby Mutassem Alley. Rebels from a Free Syrian Army checkpoint fired a volley of shots over his body, but he was not a fighter, he was an electrician who died because he climbed on to his roof to fix the wires.
It seemed hard to believe, but Mr Qarabili had stayed in his house with his wife and six children even though it had become enveloped in the fighting, sitting between the front-line checkpoints of the rival regime and Free Syrian armies.
He had nowhere to go, his neighbours said, he was too poor to move his family. He was shot from the regime side, they added.
It is that sort of war in Aleppo, but what is shocking is how this has not scared civilians away. Indeed, the city streets are bustling like never before: shops open, even on sniper alleys, stalls springing up in any available space, scruffy children playing football and scavenging in the absence of school and food.
The population of Aleppo, three million before, has grown since the rebels seized half the city last July and made it a battlefield. Abdulraham Dedam, in charge of relief supplies for the interim council, estimated 3.5 million were crowded on both sides of the line.
It was a bitter winter, and lack of heating in the countryside and reports of death by freezing in refugee camps drove people to the city. In the parks, trees have been cut to stumps, taken for fuel, and rubbish piles up in the streets. Heads poke out of rows of flats in which not a single window is unbroken.
These occupants are fitted into a smaller space. There is no-man's land, and large areas have been destroyed by missiles, such as a sizable void in Ard al-Hamra suburb, on the edges of which six adults and 20 children of two extended families live in the remains of one house.
One family came from next door, their house destroyed by a regime Scud missile, which, according to Human Rights Watch, killed at least 78 people, including 38 children. The neighbours only lost their top floor. "We lost all our possessions," said the guest family's mother, Fadwa Umm Shady. She also lost her one-year-old boy, the youngest of her 11 children.
Her husband, Talib Rajo, was a construction labourer but now has no work, so they collect empty cans for scrap, making $10 a week.
British, other European and US government agencies and aid groups have congregated on the Turkish border to distribute help, but demand Western standards of organisation and transparency, contracts and delivery schedules, amid the chaos of revolution. Aid has gone missing, or been held up by paperwork. Rebel groups argue about control. Scores of rubbish trucks are supposed to have been delivered, but none had been seen by any official asked.
The trucks' main purpose is to cut the incidence of leishmaniasis – sand-fly disease – a disfiguring condition that has swept Aleppo, with an estimated 200,000 cases.
Worse is coming. At one of the main hospitals – moved from its previous site, now just rubble after being repeatedly hit by regime jets – a doctor who gave his name as Rabia said there were hundreds of cases of tuberculosis, the classic symptom of overcrowding.
Medical staff are bracing themselves for the diseases of summer and poor water, cholera and even typhoid.
No one has any guess as to how long this will continue. While the regime is making advances further south, there seems little possibility of a major counter-offensive here.
As for the rebels, they said they had for the time being given up on taking the rest of the city, because every advance was met by air raids on the civilian population.
On either side of the lines or – like Mr Qarabili – between them, are civilians whose numbers are unclear but who do not care who wins as long as it all stops.
"Every day you have people dead, children dead, homes destroyed. All we want is our peace back," Fadwa Umm Shady said. "Even if that means Assad stays, Assad who destroyed all this, my house, so be it."
This is not a popular view in some rural areas, where President Assad has become not so much an object of fear as a remote, almost irrelevant bogeyman. But they need not worry: peace now seems like the other crazy demands of the revolution, an idea whose time has not come.
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