Qusayr residents left to pick up the pieces

Qusayr: A line of unmarked cars and pick-up trucks ferried weary Hezbollah forces back to Lebanon on Sunday as stunned residents began returning to the war-ravaged town of Qusayr, in Syrian government control again after a fierce three-week battle that ended last week.

Syrian officials staged a boisterous victory rally amid the rubble, but the town they captured bore little resemblance to the one they lost to rebel forces more than a year ago. Every building within several blocks of the town’s centre appeared to have been badly damaged or destroyed.

The surviving facades were riddled with bullet holes, evidence of the fierce battles they witnessed; numerous buildings had collapsed into heaps of debris. Household items — a computer keyboard, a pair of sneakers, a child’s colouring book — poked out from the ruins.

Each side had used heavy arms in Qusayr and it was impossible to say who had done more damage, the rebels or the regime.

Still, Qusayr has emerged as a potent symbol of the changing momentum of the more than two-year Syrian civil war, and authorities vowed to rebuild the town and restore services.

“We’ve cut a major umbilical cord of the opposition,” Homs province governor Ahmad Munir Mohammad, a staunch loyalist of President Bashar Al Assad, said in an interview.

Qusayr had served as an opposition logistics hub for supplies and fighters from Lebanon, only about 16 km away. Its fall has provided a major psychological and strategic triumph for the government — and an equally potent blow for Syria’s disparate rebel forces, already facing supply shortages and divisions within their ranks.

Syrian authorities displayed captured weapons, explosives, homemade bombs and brand-new rebel uniforms emblazoned with the names of rebel brigades and marked in English as ‘Made in Turkey’ — Syria’s northern neighbour and a key ally of Syria’s opposition forces.

The fall of Qusayr marked the latest in a series of battlefield victories for Al Assad’s forces, prompting some analysts to reconsider predictions that he would not last the year. The government declared the town’s fall as a “turning point” in the war.

Playing a key role in the battle to take Qusayr were militiamen from the Lebanon-based Hezbollah movement.

Hezbollah kept a low profile during Sunday’s victory celebration, which featured fiery pro-government speeches, crackles of celebratory gunfire and supporters waving Syrian flags and chanting pro-Al Assad slogans. Hezbollah’s yellow flag was nowhere in evidence during the animated ceremony, held amid the ruins of downtown.

Among the first to return were various families from Qusayr’s Christian minority, who represented perhaps 10 per cent of the more than 40,000 residents of Qusayr. Many arrived to find rubble in place of homes where their families had lived for generations. In front of one row of caved-in structures, several Christian residents profusely thanked a Hezbollah commander for having helped eject the rebels, whom the Christians viewed as hostile to non-Muslims.

“We’ve come back to our home and we don’t have a place to sit or water to drink,” said a retired house painter, 66, who gazed forlornly at the battered remains of a pair of adjacent homes where he and his extended family had lived for decades. “I don’t understand what kind of freedom [the rebels] were looking for,” added the resident, Salim, who, like others, asked to be identified only by his first name for security reasons.

Several holes pierced the gold-coloured dome of St Elias Roman Catholic Church, a prominent structure in the centre of town. Inside, the marble altar was broken, the likenesses of saints and Christ were defaced and the walls were filled with anti-Christian graffiti.

Visitors to the church on Sunday expressed dismay at the sectarian nature of the slogans, apparently scrawled by extremists among the rebel ranks. Some elements of the Syrian opposition have links to Al Qaida.

“It’s a big shock to see something like this in a church,” said Osama Hassan, a government employee and Muslim who was among those walking through St Elias. “For us, a church is the same as a mosque.”

A nearby mosque was also heavily damaged, parts of its minaret having been blasted away.

Residents blamed the rebels for fomenting sectarian differences among a mixed population that had long coexisted seamlessly.

“Here, the Christian and Muslim cemeteries are right next to each other,” said one resident. “We never had divisions.”

The rebel takeover more than a year ago had prompted most of Qusayr’s residents to flee. But several thousand remained, residents said, among them a petite 70-year-old woman who couldn’t hide her smile on Sunday — though she said she had lost much weight, and appeared extremely thin.

“This feels like a wedding day for me,” said the woman, who declined to give her name. “We mostly stayed in our houses and didn’t leave.”

There has been no official word on casualties in the battle for Qusayr, but residents and others interviewed indicated that the toll was high on both sides in days of street fighting to push back rebel forces. One Hezbollah commander said privately that 80 of the Lebanese militiamen had been killed in the battle, but Hezbollah has not confirmed how many of its fighters were lost. Nor have the Syrian government or the opposition command given casualty figures.