Through a quirk of fate, I was on a bus travelling from Beirut to Damascus on the day the United States, Britain and France launched air strikes. The name of the bus, Al Ma’arri Travel & Tourism, was chosen for an 11th-century blind Syrian poet-philosopher, Abu’l ‘Ala Al Merri, whose treatise on forgiveness is thought to have influenced Dante’s Divine Comedy. His poems expressed the pessimism of his times, during which political anarchy and social decay were prevalent. He became a vegetarian and adopted a life of seclusion.
Our clergy-led coach party was treated like royalty throughout; there was no need even to sully our feet with a descent from the bus at the border, which was especially surreal for me, accustomed as I was to queueing for hours. Breezing through the checkpoints, our bus clearly shone with the sanctity of those on board. My previous trip in late 2014, to rescue my Damascus house from war profiteers, had involved packets of cigarettes passed to soldiers and profuse sweating as hands rummaged among my bags.
When I bought the crumbling building in Damascus’s old city in 2005, I did so as a private individual, with no shortcuts or favours. For three years, I battled to complete its restoration, fighting labyrinthine bureaucracy, helped only by ordinary Syrians, including an architect and his team of craftsmen, a lawyer and a bank manager. Various friends who lost their homes in the suburbs to bombardment by the regime have lived there since 2012 — up to five families at some points, more after the Ghouta chemical attack in 2013 when the courtyard was full of mattresses. Today, just one extended family lives there at my invitation, in residence since 2015.
In the Christian quarter of the city, we were whisked on to a smaller bus that wiggled its way past the Damascus citadel into the pedestrianised square, directly in front of the spiritual heart of the city, the Umayyad mosque. Its magnificent courtyard had been cleared of worshippers in our honour and we were ushered into an audience hall I had never known existed, despite scores of previous visits. Here, the grand mufti — the country’s most senior Muslim authority — Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun, presided over an atmosphere of bonhomie and spoke of the joy of Muslim-Christian relations.
In Homs, our next stop, we passed countless chilling posters of the Syrian president, Bashar Al Assad, mainly in his dark glasses and military fatigues, the slogan beneath assuring his people he would protect Syria from “the terrorists”. Before the war, the Al Assad look was more tracksuited, on a bicycle taking his son to school, or tenderly planting trees at the roadside.
Homs was shockingly empty, acres of devastation, with only the famous Khalid Bin Al Waleed mosque hastily restored by the military construction department to be viewed from afar. It is an empty shell for show, like so much else.
“Trapped” was the word I heard again and again from my Syrian friends, Muslim and Christian, to describe their predicament. While the world debates the legality of air strikes, to those on the ground the action amounts to no more than hot air. Not one of my friends even mentioned the strikes, knowing their fate remains unchanged — to be killed if they dare to protest or to submit to the will of Al Assad. It is far too late for the West and the international community to intervene militarily in Syria — that should have been done in 2011, or 2013 at the latest, before Daesh or Russia came in to fill the lawless vacuum the West ignored.
Now the only option is to keep up all forms of pressure on the Al Assad regime and on [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, to make both feel the heat. In the past, Al Assad has caved in quickly to pressure, such as when he removed his troops from Lebanon in a matter of weeks, following the international outrage at the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister of Lebanon, in 2005. Al Assad and Putin are umbilically connected at present, but if the cord were cut, leaving Al Assad stripped of his Russian shield, he would capitulate much faster than anyone imagines. All it needs is a united and coherent policy. That’s something that has been sadly lacking so far.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Diana Darke is the author of The Merchant of Syria.
