Looking for answers in the random nature of war
We went to the Old City of Damascus this morning – it’s our last day and we thought we had finished filming. Suddenly we heard the sound of a mortar crashing in – the shop we were visiting shook a little but it wasn’t so loud.
Thom, our producer, went to have a look and a few minutes later came running back: the mortar had landed in the square in front of the Umayyad mosque just a few yards away.
We rushed down and cameraman Chris Hease started to film. Everyone was crowding round a white van, trying to push people toward it – I couldn’t tell if they were alive or dead.
Blood was spilling out, a woman was screaming, everyone was desperate to get their relative in.
Suddenly I realised it was our van – our driver Ali was revving up ready to speed as fast as he could to the hospital.
He screeched away, and people began to run into the souk. And then it was quiet. A small red woman’s shoe lay in the square. Blood pooled on the cobbles. It was over.
(Above: Old City, Damascus. Photo: Thom Walker)
How random war is. A few yards this way or that, a minute earlier or later means life or death.
View Thom Walker’s photo gallery from Damascus.
Until six months ago, the war was something happening somewhere else, but now stray mortars, presumably fired by the rebels, land in central Damascus every day.
It’s nothing like the rebel-held suburbs, where people struggle to find enough to eat because of the government blockade, and fighting continues month after month. But people can no longer pretend the war is not their problem.
Yesterday we visited the Bakdash icecream parlour, an Old City institution since 1895 which – the owner proudly told me – had once hosted King Abdullah of Jordan.
(Above: a man making icecream in Bakdash Photo: Thom Walker)
It was thronged with people eating delicious vanilla with pistachios, and – this being the Arab world where everyone is hospitable and generous – we couldn’t leave until we’d all eaten a huge mound that we weren’t allowed to pay for.
Business, it seemed, was booming.
“The crisis doesn’t bother us too much,” said Ahmad Bakdash, the son of the owner, who was presiding today.
“If a mortar falls, it only affects us for an hour or so. After that, things go back to normal. The next day it’s as if nothing happened.”
How normal central Damascus is, and how absolutely not normal at all.
A mortar landed on a street corner in the largely Christian neighbourhood of Jeramana last Sunday, killing Samir Abdel Hanna.
His widow, Daad Sahaf, has made a little shrine to him in the family apartment. His lined face looks out between two candles.
“He said I’ll only be ten minutes – there’s something I have to do in the office,” she told me, biting back tears. “He said: I’ll be right back.”
(Above: The Hanna family in Jermana Photo: Thom Walker)
Christians and Muslims alike look to God for answers. It’s hard to know where else to find them. Many Damascenes support the government, not because they love President Bashar al-Assad, but because they fear the jihadis amongst the armed opposition, and because they had a good life before the war.
“We don’t need freedom, we need security and peace,” said Daad.
Outside the Greek Orthodox church in Bab Touma, I met Zepur Atokamian, carrying a picture of her seven year old son, Houanness.
He was one of nine children killed when mortar rounds fell on their school and school bus.
How can a mother make sense of that? How can anyone? There are rights and wrongs in this war, like any other, but it’s hard to remember them when faced by a grieving mother holding a portrait of her bright-faced smiling son.
“He would never sit still. He was always playing and running around,” she told me. “He didn’t like to sleep, and I don’t know how he can be sleeping now. His body is cold.”
She sobbed and there were no words of comfort I, or anyone, could offer.
Follow @lindseyhilsum on Twitter