the other side of Syria

 Around all of the great sights that one can see in Syria, however, is the awful legacy of the recent conflicts, with very visible war damage to homes and businesses.  Not to mention that the parts of the country around Idlib and Rojava are still subject to flare-ups.  It’s estimated that some 600,000 have been killed in the war, and millions have fled overseas.  I met several of the latter, on ‘home visits’ to their families – most of them very well-educated and now completing their studies overseas (eg one doing her masters in disaster prevention civil engineering, another looking for a place to continue her studies in genetics to doctorate level).  It made me feel rather guilty that I’d been so awestruck at all of the physical war damage, excitedly taking photos of the remains of apartment blocks without really thinking that those had been peoples’ homes, and that there might have been people inside when the rockets struck.  But when I expressed this to the people I met they were very understanding and expressed their pleasure that I was there, in their country.

We saw so much physical damage in the country, including the massive damage to the ancient Aleppo souk – which they are starting to restore, in the old style and using the old stones from the piles of rubble.  In the town of Maaloula we visited the remains of the Safir Hotel, attacked in 2013 by the Al-Nusra Front (an Al Qaeda offshoot).  They sent a suicide bomber in a truck to the entrance of Maaloula, the explosion giving the signal for an attack on the town, with the jihadists capturing the hotel and using it to fire in the direction of the community below. The mangled, rusted remains of the truck are now outside the front of the hotel.

Sadly I don’t have any photos from my 1985 visit to Palmyra, but the extensive damage ISIS did to that site has been well-publicised, and it doesn’t look anywhere near as spectacular as it did on that first trip.  I even found a bullet amongst the rubble (which I pocketed as a souvenir…).

57 countries, apparently, have economic sanctions in place against Syria, including the US, UK, Turkey, and the EU and Arab League.  This seems to be primarily in response to ‘violent repression’ of dissent and the illegal removal of goods belonging to Syria’s cultural heritage, but they are also included on the US State Sponsors of Terrorism list.  This means that there are no flights in and out of the country, very little fuel (a limit of 25 litres per vehicle per week), and no access to many internet platforms.  So we had to cross in and out through the land border with Lebanon, had to buy bags of Syrian pounds with our US$ before crossing the border, had to pull in to various known roadside spots where a young lad would run out of the bushes with canisters of fuel for our bus, and with US-manufactured phones, two of us had to put our phones onto flight mode before we were able to connect to hotel wifi.

I was a little surprised to see Russian troops in certain places.  Russia helped Assad to win back Aleppo in 2015 (lost to the extremists in 2012), but I hadn’t expected them to still be around.  But like the Syrian soldiers, they are ok as long as you don’t get your camera out near them.

Oh, I suppose the ‘other side’ of my trip should also include our burst tyre, which went with a very loud bang as we drove along one day!