The growing cancer of sectarian hate in Syria
In the thick of a violent civil war any attempt to point out the strange normality of life in much of central Damascus will be met as blatant pro-Assad war propaganda.
But it’s also the truth.
Of course there will be the thump (sometime enough to faintly rattle the windows) of the shelling. But it is outgoing from the batteries situated above Damascus in the hills. The surreal month-after-month monotony of a government reducing the suburbs of its very own capital to pulverised dust and fragmented ferro-concrete wilderness.
But nobody bothers. Damascenes simply do not register it any more. Any more than they notice the sandbagged soldiers pointing rifles at the still-choking city centre traffic at checkpoints – or the fact that such checkpoints choke the traffic still further. It has become the new normal.
At street level you cannot even make out the columns of black smoke slowly towering into the sky from the battle zones of the eastern and southern suburbs perhaps five miles distant. No, you have to be several floors up to see any of that.
The deserted rubble-lands of places like Daraya – London’s Croydon or Glasgow’s Easterhouse if you like – are simply places where few people live any more and almost nobody goes unless they are intent upon killing someone else or salvaging what can be got from wherever the family once lived.
No – the city centre remains all but untouched. True, there are some displaced people camped out in the few open spaces Damascus has but in truth it is not something the casual visitor would even notice.
The vast majority of shops are still open as they ever were. It’s true the prices of some basic foodstuffs like fruit and veg have increased several hundred per cent during the war – but they are still on sale and people are still buying somehow.
Yes, the restaurants are not exactly bursting and plenty have closed altogether. Yet plenty more are still pretty busy with that classic mix of Damascene women: some primped and preened, stilettoed and mascarad to within an inch of their lives, no doubt talking to lifelong friends demurely hijabed or otherwise scarved.
The uber-fashionista sartorial style of many women here commented on by a famous Damascus stand-up recently, accusing the rebels of coming to take away “our women” – referring to pro-Assad fears that joyless jihadis are fighting to take over “their” state and cover “their” women forever. How true? How false? Nobody really knows but in Assadist areas of the city this fear runs deep.
Deeper still in the Alawite and Christian communities who fear being tarred as regime-loyalists whatever their private politics might be – they fear the growing sectarian world of swirling violence here where a name, accent or even where you live might well be enough to get you kidnapped today, murdered tomorrow.
Such fear could well become reality – may well already be so. And that is tragic in this city where the church neighbouring the mosque a few feet away is so common as to be the essential badge of historic honour in this ancient, tolerant city.
True, entire districts are being lost, have been lost, to the guns of both sides but in greater part due to the massed artillery of President Assad – but the loss of tolerance, the growing cancer of sectarian hate is becoming much harder to ignore here than the thumping soundtrack of the outgoing artillery or occasional blast of an incoming mortar or car-bomb.
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