The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: homs
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

Syria Rebels Poised For Final Retreat From Heart Of Homs

Syria Rebels Poised For Final Retreat From Heart Of Homs

Homs (Syria) – The last rebels were poised to leave the center of the battleground Syrian city of Homs on Thursday, handing a symbolic victory to President Bashar al-Assad ahead of a controversial election.

Rebels hit back in the historic heart of Aleppo, blowing up a luxury hotel turned army position after tunneling under the front line that divides the main northern city.

At least 80 percent of rebel fighters have already left the Old City of Homs under the unprecedented negotiated evacuation that began on Wednesday, provincial governor Talal Barazi told AFP.

The remaining 300 to 400 were due to leave on Thursday, Barazi said, although no evacuation buses had emerged by early afternoon.

The pullout from the city center after a siege of nearly two years leaves the rebels confined to a single district in the outskirts of a city that what was for long an iconic bastion of the uprising.

Barazi said negotiations were well advanced for the rebels to leave that neighborhood too in the coming weeks.

“80 percent of the rebels have left the city. The remaining 20 percent will leave on Thursday,” Barazi told AFP.

“On Wednesday, 980 people left, the great majority rebels but some of them civilians, including women and children.”

He said just 300 to 400 people now remained in the Old City and they too would be bussed out on Thursday to the opposition-held town of Dar al-Kabira, 13 miles north of Homs.

Barazi was able to visit his former office in the Old City on Thursday for the first time in three years.

It is not the first deal between the government and the rebels — a number of ceasefires have been agreed in the outskirts of Damascus.

But it is the first time that rebel fighters have withdrawn from an area they controlled under an accord with the government.

The government allowed the remaining rebels in Homs to pull out with some of their weapons in return for the release of dozens of prisoners and hostages held by opposition fighters and the delivery of relief supplies to two pro-government towns in the north which they have besieged.

The negotiations were overseen by the ambassador of Syria’s close ally Iran.

Abu Wissam, one of the last rebel fighters awaiting evacuation from the city center, bemoaned the outside interests now at play in a conflict that had begun as an Arab Spring-inspired protest movement.

“I took part in the protests from very early on. During that time, there were no international agendas controlling the protests. Everyone acted freely and spontaneously,” he told AFP via the Internet.

“But now, everyone is moved like pawns in a chess game. The evacuation is a big game that has been in the planning” for many months by regional and international powers, he said.

There have been many sieges imposed by both sides in the three-year-old conflict but that of the Old City of Homs has been by the far longest.

Some 2,200 people were killed as near daily bombardment reduced the area to ruins.

The rebel pullout comes less than a month before a controversial presidential election, described as farce by Western governments and the opposition, that is expected to return Assad to office.

On a visit to Washington for talks with President Barack Obama, opposition chief Ahmad Jarba said the vote will give Assad “a licence … to kill his own people for many years to come.”

In Aleppo, the rebel attack completely destroyed the Carlton Citadel Hotel, just across the road from the city’s UNESCO-listed Citadel, which the army had been using as a frontline position.

At least 14 soldiers and pro-government militiamen were killed in the explosion and its aftermath, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The Islamic Front, the largest rebel alliance in Aleppo, said it carried out the attack, which state television said also destroyed neighboring historic buildings.

A rebel offensive in July 2012 in which they seized large swathes of Aleppo left the Citadel and nearby hotels which had once thronged with foreign tourists on the front line of the deadly conflict.

AFP Photo/ Jim Lopez

Syrian Military Captures Crusader Castle From Rebels

Syrian Military Captures Crusader Castle From Rebels

By Nabih Bulos and Patrick J. McDonnell, Los Angeles Times

BEIRUT — The Syrian military on Thursday captured a historic Crusader castle that had long been a highly symbolic rebel bastion, the latest victory in an ongoing offensive along the Lebanese border, according to government and opposition accounts.

Krak des Chevaliers, a colossal hilltop fortress dating to the 12th century named after a medieval Crusader order, was overrun after a series of fierce battles in the nearby town of Hossen that concluded with government troops hoisting a Syrian flag above the celebrated citadel.

The image of the national colors rising above the renowned monument, a moment captured on video broadcast on Syrian state television, was a dramatic indication of how pro-government forces have gained ground in recent months against deeply divided rebels fighting to oust President Bashar Assad.

“The Syrian Arab Army raises the flag of the nation over the Krak des Chevaliers castle in Homs province after crushing the terrorists who were holed up there,” triumphant state television declared, echoing the official description of rebels as “terrorists.”

As the Syrian civil war this month entered its fourth year, the government boasted of several important advances. On Sunday, the military overran the longtime rebel stronghold of Yabroud, not far from the Lebanese border about 70 miles southeast of Krak des Chevaliers.

Sealing rebel supply and logistics lines from neighboring Lebanon has long been a major focus of the Syrian military. The capture of the castle and nearby towns, along with earlier military advances in the border zone, have curbed the rebels’ ability to ferry in supplies and fresh fighters from Lebanon.

Krak des Chevaliers, visible from the main highway from Homs city to the Mediterranean coast, had long been a high-profile symbol of opposition strength in strategic western Homs province, the gateway to central and northern Syria from Damascus, the capital.

Islamist rebels recognized the strategic benefits of the mountain-top castle just as Christian Crusaders had done centuries earlier.

The castle’s construction is attributed to the Knights Hospitaller, who held the site until it was captured in 1271 by Muslim forces.

The fortress was a major tourist attraction until the Syrian conflict broke out in March 2011. Antigovernment insurgents captured the site and surrounding towns.

The fort, a UNESCO World Heritage site, has reportedly suffered extensive damage from mortar attacks, airstrikes and gun battles. The extent of the destruction at the castle is unclear.

One little-noticed effect of the Syrian conflict has been the damage to numerous historic sites in a nation that has been a crossroads for various civilizations. The Old City of Aleppo, another World Heritage site that was a terminus of the Silk Road, also has been pummeled during the Syrian conflict, with many of its buildings and parts of its acclaimed covered market destroyed. The ruins of Palmyra, a trading hub of the Roman empire in what is now eastern Syria, has seen some of its monuments looted, authorities say.

Conservationists say it is impossible to determine the extent of the devastation to Syria’s historic patrimony until some semblance of peace is restored and experts can visit hard-hit areas and make an assessment. That may take a long time. All diplomatic efforts to end the conflict have faltered.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based pro-opposition group, confirmed the fall of the Krak des Chevaliers, reporting that “no less than 12 fighters were killed … in clashes with regime forces in the countryside of Hossen.” Some accounts put the rebel death toll in the dozens.

The government’s advance, accompanied by artillery bombardment, prompted many rebels to flee to neighboring Lebanon. At least 25 wounded Syrians crossed into Lebanese territory, Lebanon’s national news agency reported.

AFP Photo/Jim Lopez