Tag: old city
Israel Clamps Down On Activists Ahead Of Pope’s Visit

Israel Clamps Down On Activists Ahead Of Pope’s Visit

By Jan-Uwe Ronneburger and Shabtai Gold

JERUSALEM — Israel has banned four far-right activists from entering the Old City of Jerusalem during the pope’s upcoming visit, a police spokesman confirmed Thursday.

They include three youths under the age of 18, spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld said.

The orders issued by police also place the activists under administrative house arrest during parts of Pope Francis’ stay in the Holy Land on Sunday and Monday.

Roman Catholic leaders in Israel and the Palestinian territories have condemned a series of recent anti-Christian hate crimes by Jewish extremists, including racist graffiti sprayed on churches.

Israel Tourism Minister Uzi Landau told the German news agency dpa that “marginal groups” are behind the incidents.

“We are speaking about criminals. The police will deal with that, and I hope they will be even much more successful in doing that,” said Landau, adding that the incidents were “embarrassing.”

Israel’s security services said they decided to issue the house arrest orders as a preventative measure, amid concern extremists were planning to cause provocations.

Haaretz newspaper reported that the Shin Bet intelligence agency had collected evidence of “intentions by radical right wing activists to disrupt the visit of the pope planned for next week, and also to engage in provocative and illegal actions in order to incite inter-religious tensions ahead of the visit.”

The pope starts his trip on Saturday in Jordan.

 maxnathans via Flickr

Syrian Residents Return To The Ancient And Now Ruined City Of Homs

Syrian Residents Return To The Ancient And Now Ruined City Of Homs

By Patrick J. McDonnell, Los Angeles Times

HOMS, Syria — Wary of looters and anxious to get back home, the displaced residents of the war-battered Old City of Homs have been filing back into their bombed-out neighborhoods.

They push baby strollers and drag suitcases to be used in an epic salvage operation. At times, it is hard to distinguish between ex-residents gathering what little is left of their belongings and those picking the ruins clean of others’ possessions.

Soldiers checked IDs to be sure people had a right to what they were taking, but inspections weren’t especially rigorous. Pickups parked outside blown-up buildings, their drivers busy emptying out the contents.

Some stood guard over their reclaimed dwellings.

“No one should leave their home now,” said Ibrahim El Helu, 64, a Boston-trained engineer who packed a pistol to discourage thieves.

From afar, the vast rubble zone brings to mind images of Dresden, Stalingrad and other cities destroyed in World War II. Much will have to be razed.

Amid so much chaos, many returnees have camped out in their old homes, despite the lack of water and electricity and the apocalyptic scenes that greeted them. Few did not find their residences looted and trashed during the rebel occupation — closets emptied out, clothes scattered on the floor, drawers rifled through and wood furniture chopped for kindling.

“This is my home; I invested everything in it,” said Umeima Aboud, 44, who decided to stay with her two grown sons at her second-floor flat in the Bustan al-Diwan district. “I will rebuild.”

Access became possible early this month when gunmen agreed to decamp in a deal for safe passage. Insurgents had occupied the district for almost two years as government troops laid siege to the Old City, directing heavy bombardment at the vast warren of narrow streets and alleys.

Returning residents dumped soiled clothes, broken furniture and other items onto ever-growing trash piles on the rubble-strewn streets.

The mood was alternately cheerful and despondent, elated and sober. Many were outraged.

“This is their democracy?” asked Hassan Jubrail, taking a visitor through the charred remains of his home, cursing the rebels who had occupied the zone. “I don’t want to have anything to do with their democracy!”

Still others came to the Old City to seek traces of missing relatives, believed kidnapped by the rebels during the worst of the fighting. Hundreds are counted among the “disappeared” in Homs. One man said he found his brother’s car, burned beyond repair, but no sign of his sibling. Charred and crushed vehicles, some riddled with bullet holes, blot the streets.

Multitudes clamber inside bullet-sprayed storefronts and up creaky stairways to snatch some relic of a past existence. They are among Homs’ displaced legions, their lives subject to great upheaval since the war began.

They haul out vacuum cleaners and beds, lamps and side tables, photos, toys, carpets, clocks — just about any reminder of the material hodgepodge of daily existence.

Many seem to take comfort in grabbing some artifact of their previous, stable lives in this once tranquil provincial town. Before the war, Homs was known for its fierce desert wind, its relaxed lifestyle and plethora of Muslim and Christian houses of worship.

“We’re lucky; we found something,” said a lamppost-thin man who went by the nickname Abu Anas. He pushed a bicycle stacked with a jumble of stiff arms, legs and torsos, a macabre apparition in a war zone. They were remnants of mannequins from his nearby clothing store, called Spring.

“There’s a lot of damage, but we can rebuild,” Abu Anas declared with relief as he urged his ghoulish cargo forward.

Walls remain sprayed with sometimes blood-curdling rebel graffiti, often of a blatantly sectarian nature. “Watch where you sleep,” warns one scrawl. “I will come from a tunnel to kill you.” Another announces the presence of “Abu Qutada … the Chechen.” The walls of an apartment apparently used as a kind of command center contain scribbles proclaiming that fighters eagerly anticipate their posthumous encounters with the “mermaids,” the virgins awaiting martyrs in the after-life, according to the militants’ belief.

Ahmad Halbani, 50, a father of three, carried a pair of shopping bags filled with mementos salvaged from his destroyed apartment in the Khalidiya district, adjacent to the Old City.

They were just odds and ends: women’s curlers and hairpins, and a stylized, 1960s photograph of Halbani’s late father in military uniform.

“At least we all got out alive,” said Halbani. He and his family headed down Hama Street, once a lively boulevard, now a ghostly route flanked by obliterated multistory buildings.

Some structures are pancaked, signature destruction of direct hits from aerial bombs; others are hollowed out, blackened and shot through with holes, like giant slabs of moldy Swiss cheese. Atop one six-story structure, a massive air conditioner perched precariously, seemingly about to cascade down onto a pyramid of debris atop of what was a sidewalk.

“At least I got what I came for,” said an exhausted, veiled woman, 27, who went by the nickname Um Omar.

She pushed a wheeled metal hospital bed stacked high with household items.

“Our house is gone,” Um Omar said, taking a break from her solitary labors.

She trudged off along Hamidiya Street, having found at least some part of her former life in this ancient and now ruined city.

AFP Photo

Many In The Syrian Town Of Homs Feel As If The Civil War Has Ended

Many In The Syrian Town Of Homs Feel As If The Civil War Has Ended

By Patrick J. McDonnell, Los Angeles Times

HOMS, Syria — On the long-militarized edges of Syria’s Old City of Homs, volunteers Monday took down walls of cinder block and brick that had long served as shields against snipers hidden in the ruins of the rebel-held ancient quarter.

“For us, the war is over,” said Firas Alabdallah, an engineer helping to collect material for use in a cemetery for pro-government “martyrs.”

The Syrian war is certainly not over. Broad swaths of the country remain contested or under opposition control. But to many in Homs, once dubbed the “capital” of the Syrian uprising, it does feel like the end.

The fact that the core of Syria’s third largest city is back in government control is a major triumph for President Bashar Assad and the latest setback for rebels fighting to oust him. In a deal with Syrian authorities, some 2,000 insurgents agreed to leave the Old City last week and were given safe passage out.

An almost two-year military siege succeeded in wearing down a rebel force lacking food, medical supplies and other essentials.

Residents were thrilled to take strolls again in recent days, despite the dystopia of hollowed-out buildings and rubble-strewn streets. Many shed tears of joy.

Months of bombardment and gun battles turned the once-venerable Old City and several adjacent districts into something like an outsized set for a Hollywood disaster blockbuster. Thin rays of light beamed into the previously dark confines of the old covered souk from multitudes of shrapnel punctures in the metal roof.

Landmarks, streets, cafes and houses of worship that had long been integral threads in the town’s fabric of life were not cut off anymore in a deadly no-go zone.

People walked about in wonderment as though viewing ancient historical ruins.

The war has left profound scars. People don’t like to talk about it much, but Homs’ combustible sectarian mix was a major reason the war took on such a punishing character locally.

“It is easy to repair physical destruction,” said Father Tamer Awil, a Syriac Orthodox priest in the Old City, speaking inside the heavily damaged Church Our Lady of the Belt, named after a relic said to be from a belt associated with the mother of Jesus. “But the people of Homs have been damaged in their hearts and souls. Repairing that damage is much more difficult.”

Many residents, especially among the Sunni Muslim majority, remain embittered about the government, though few if any feel safe talking about such matters publicly.

Three years ago, the Old City hosted vociferous anti-government protests that reached a global audience on the Internet. Many of the rebels were sons of Homs. Now soldiers with AK-47 rifles man those same streets, taking breaks with mate tea sipped through metal straws, a South American custom brought back by Syrian expatriates.

“I don’t care that my house was destroyed,” said one distraught Sunni woman in a headdress and black cloak who spoke Monday while exiting the Old City with a small shopping bag of items salvaged from her home. “I want the president to get my son and the others out of prison.”

The woman, who identified herself by the nickname Um Asaad, broke into tears as she spoke about her missing son, one of thousands in government jails and prisons. “I haven’t seen him in two years,” she sobbed, before heading off without further elaboration.

A few minutes later, a group of Christian women headed into the Old City to view the remains of their family home. The Christian minority is generally effusive about the “liberation” of an area central to their ancient identity.

“The Army has swept away all of the bad people from our city,” said Hannan Ragap, 45, a mother of two who sported spike heels and jeans as she walked toward the Old City.

In the adjacent Zahra district, people were savoring a victory against what many view as an existential threat from a radical Islamist force. The neighborhood is home to many Alawites, the Muslim sect whose members include President Assad.

“They wanted to force us out, but we refused to leave,” said Alabdallah, the engineer who is in charge of the neighborhood “martyr’s” cemetery, with more than 2,000 graves, and is helping take down the sniper barriers, some as high as 30 feet.

Once the Old City opened up, some from Zahra went searching for traces of missing relatives kidnapped during the war, presumably by the rebels. Officials say hundreds remain missing.

“We found my brother’s car burned, but no trace of him,” said Mustafa Ahmad Alabood, a municipal official who explained that his brother, Amer, a taxi driver, was among the many kidnapped and presumably killed.

In general, though, many people seemed inclined to put such dark thoughts aside as they sought to reclaim Homs. The longing for a pre-conflict sense of normality and order was evident among residents of all sects and creeds who headed to the remains of the Old City.

“People here are tired of the war, they’ve had enough,” said Jamal Moazen, 52 a metal worker who was hauling blankets and other scavenged items onto a pickup. “We want our city back.”

©afp.com / Joseph Eid

Landmark Syrian Hotel Destroyed As Rebels Set Off Underground Blast

Landmark Syrian Hotel Destroyed As Rebels Set Off Underground Blast

By Patrick J. McDonnell, Los Angeles Times

BEIRUT — A huge blast destroyed a hotel in the historic heart of the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on Thursday after rebels detonated explosives in a tunnel dug beneath government lines, according to opposition and government accounts.

The explosion ripped through the Carlton Citadel Hotel, near the landmark medieval Citadel and Aleppo’s walled Old City, both deemed United Nations World Heritage sites. Opposition activists said the onetime luxury hotel had become a military base.

Islamist rebels tunneled beneath the hotel and “detonated a large quantity of explosives,” said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a pro-opposition monitoring group based in Britain. The hotel was “completely collapsed,” the group said, along with several neighboring buildings.

At least 14 soldiers and “pro-regime militants” were killed in the blast and during subsequent clashes, the observatory said.

The state media reported “huge damage to the historic site” after rebels blew up “tunnels they dug under archaeological buildings.”

Video posted on the Internet purporting to document the explosion showed a massive blast and a plume of smoke erupting into the air and drifting over the city, followed by automatic weapons fire.

The Carlton Citadel Hotel, among the most luxurious of the hostelries that catered to Aleppo’s once-booming tourist trade, was situated in a renovated stone building that once housed an Ottoman-era hospital.

Syrian rebels have gained considerable expertise at building tunnels, often beneath the rubble in bombed-out districts, and apparently have also mastered remote detonation of explosives cached underground. Earlier this week, the opposition said that dozens of pro-government forces were killed when rebels set off a bomb in a tunnel excavated beneath a checkpoint in northwestern Idlib province.

Aleppo, a trading terminus going back to ancient times, has been a battleground for almost two years in the Syrian conflict. The city, Syria’s commercial hub before the war broke out, remains divided between government and rebel forces.

Vast swaths of Aleppo, including parts of the landmark Old City, have been destroyed in bombardments and gun battles. In recent weeks, both sides have mounted attacks in a bid to gain ground and break the stalemate.

A fire swept through the Old City’s ancient covered market in 2012, causing extensive destruction. The 12th-century Umayyad Mosque has also suffered heavy damage from shelling.

AFP Photo/Ward al-Keswani