2013-06-19T15:19:46-04:00 Andrew Sheehan http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/author/index.php?author=andrew-sheehan Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Andrew Sheehan Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2647889 2013-02-08T17:36:19-05:00 2013-04-10T05:12:01-04:00

Andrew Sheehan http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-sheehan/
Even now, the uprising having long since degenerated into a vicious civil war, and news of violence and destruction having become constant throughout the week, the old city is noticeably tenser and quieter on Fridays.

During the week the checkpoint near my house is staffed by a group of relaxed middle-aged soldiers who are fairly familiar with everyone in the neighbourhood and only occasionally bother to stop people to ask them for their documents. Instead, they spend most of their time trying to keep warm by the wood-fired stove in their small shelter. This was originally a simple affair but over the course of the last few months it has evolved to become a small wooden house with a piece of glass salvaged from a grocery store for a window, and a Syrian flag and a large photo of the president for decoration.

On recent Fridays, however, the regular soldiers have been assisted by a pair of younger, more athletic and more serious colleagues. One of them, sporting a thin scar running horizontally across his face, sat on a chair on the footpath scanning through people's documents, while another stood nearby holding his rifle, politely stopping anyone who tried to sneak past.

Also present on Fridays are the members of the local "Popular Committees" -- essentially civilian loyalists that have been provided with weapons by the government. In my neighbourhood they are hardly seen during the week, but spend Fridays standing guard on various street corners. One Friday recently a young armed guard was standing at the junction of the small covered lane in which my house is located and the wider lane that it branches off, watching me as I exited my house.

In addition to these soldiers and armed loyalists, un-armed, plain-clothes security officers are also distributed throughout the old city much more openly and in greater numbers than during the week. One Friday afternoon I left my house to buy something to eat. I was spotted by a middle aged man with a close cropped beard and a mullet, wearing a cream jacket and beige pants with black sneakers, and with a pair of plastic wrap-around sunglasses perched on his forehead.

He called me over and took my documents and after looking at them he asked me to wait while he used his walkie-talkie to summon a colleague. He suggested, and then insisted, that I sit on a plastic chair while we waited. After a few minutes his colleague arrived, a large and friendly man with a beard and a receding hairline wearing a black leather jacket. The two of them looked through my documents and asked me about my reasons for being in Syria. They then questioned me in detail about the exact location of my house and the identity of the owner before letting me go on my way.

The same night I was again out walking in the street, when I was spotted by another plain-clothes security officer -- this time a balding overweight man wearing a thin grey track suit, accompanied by an armed soldier in jeans and a camouflage jacket. The man in the tracksuit seemed to take his job more seriously than the others I had encountered and was thus considerably less polite and more suspicious. He also took the trouble to carefully look through my passport and as he did so he saw stamps from some of the other countries I had visited, and these aroused his suspicion of me even further.

Having questioned me about where I lived and my reasons for being in Syria he insisted on accompanying me back to my neighbourhood in order to check my story with the soldiers stationed there. As he, the soldier and I walked back towards my house, he spoke constantly into his walkie-talkie, repeating my name and the countries that I had been to whoever was on the other end.

At one point the three of us, walking line abreast, were blocking the narrow street and a man on a scooter approached us from behind and tooted at us rudely. The man in the tracksuit turned around and spoke harshly to the man, causing him to back away visibly frightened.

When we arrived at the checkpoint near my house the security officer conferred with the soldiers and after a few more minutes of questions, and some careful checking of my passport and my residence permit, I was allowed to go home.

The following Friday one of my Syrian housemates returned to the house late in the morning and proceeded to knock on everybody's doors, warning us that an army patrol would soon be coming to search our house. I was told that the army was in the process of systematically searching the old city's houses for any opposition fighters that were attempting to hide out there, and that they concentrated on a different neighbourhood every Friday.

A few minutes later the soldiers arrived and split up in order to check our papers and search each room. One young soldier came to my room and questioned me, asking to see my passport and rental contract. Another soldier came to my room and looked around it quickly, asking me about a few of the things that I had left lying around.

He then asked to see what was in my laptop and sat down next to me on my bed with his Kalashnikov still slung over his shoulder. I showed him an innocuous English-language website that I had been reading and he looked at it uncomprehendingly and asked me directly whether or not I had had any contact with the armed opposition groups. I assured him that I hadn't and he seemed satisfied with my answer and got up and left my room.

Once they had finished their search the soldiers sat down and in the courtyard and chatted amicably with my Syrian housemates. After a little while their officer arrived and quickly asked us all the same questions before leading his men away to search the next house.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2502246 2013-01-18T17:36:49-05:00 2013-03-20T05:12:01-04:00

Andrew Sheehan http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-sheehan/
Near the old city's citadel a small group of children decorated theirs with a red wig from one of the nearby cosmetics shops. In the modern centre of the city I saw a soldier making a snow man, with the help of a passing civilian, on top of a concrete traffic barrier next to his post -- scooping the snow off the front steps of the bank branch that he was ostensibly guarding. A short while later I passed the same spot and his work had been cleared away.

For people here the inclement weather is especially hard to bear given the drastic shortage of heating fuel and cooking gas, and the worsening situation with regard to electricity. Since the beginning of winter the regular electricity outages that have long been a feature of life in Syria have become much longer and much more frequent.

Before, the outages occurred according to a schedule of some sort -- the power cuts would occur at approximately the same time and be of more or less the same duration every day. Now, the power is cut seemingly at random and no one has any idea how long it will be before it returns.

In the part of the old city in which I live, the power is usually cut for a couple of hours in the morning, and then again for two or three hours in the late afternoon. Sometimes the outages last for an hour or two longer than normal, and occasionally much longer: one night recently we were without electricity for seven hours -- from the afternoon until well into the night -- while a few weeks ago, my neighbourhood had no power for two whole days. In other areas the situation is much worse -- in Bab Touma, the old city's famous Christian quarter, the power has, in recent weeks, been off more often than it has been on.

The situation has been even worse, however, in the suburbs on the outskirts of the city where people have been forced to contend with a reduced supply of electricity for considerably longer than those of us who live in more central areas. Some time ago I heard from one resident of such a suburb that in her area the power supply was alternating every two hours throughout the day and night. I have also heard of another suburb in which residents endured three whole days without power.

In the absence of electricity, people here have come to depend on candles and battery powered LED lamps and torches to light their houses -- all of which have become ubiquitous in the street stalls that have proliferated since the start of the crisis. As there is a shortage of the oil used for heating here, some people have begun to heat their homes using wood-fired heaters, and I have started to notice bags of fire wood now being sold in certain street markets. People navigate the dark narrow streets of the old city using the flashlights in their mobile phones, pointing them at the ground so as not to shine them in the faces of oncoming foot traffic.

Many business owners have invested in petrol-driven generators which they use in order to keep their businesses open and attract customers. I have heard of one cafe in the old city that benefits greatly from the presence of their generator -- despite the ever-increasing cost of the petrol required to run it. As the only place in the neighbourhood that offers electricity during blackouts, it attracts large numbers of people seeking to charge their mobile phones or to connect to the Internet.

The drone of vast numbers of generators can frequently be heard throughout the city whenever the power goes out. The Umayyad Mosque has a particularly large and powerful one, the noise of which dominates the surrounding streets whenever it is turned on.

Last winter a local friend and I often strolled together of an evening through Qassaa, a popular shopping district just outside the old city. Whenever our stroll happened to coincide with a power cut, however, conversation was rendered almost impossible as, every few metres, on the pavement outside each of the small boutiques that line the area's main street, there sat one of these box-shaped generators, each making a noise similar in sound and volume to that of a lawnmower. Some of the machines also emitted wafts of white smoke.

Last Thursday there was a particularly long power cut in my area and I was told that this was a result of a fire in some part of the electricity infrastructure which serves the old city. While there was no electricity inside any of the houses, the streetlights were unaffected. Eventually one of my housemates collected a small sum from everyone in the house and paid an electrician to illegally connect our house to the power line used by the street lights. There now seem to be electricians walking the streets offering just such a service.

Thus we were able to at least light the house, although the weak current did not permit us to use our electric heaters. After a while the regular electricity returned and all of hurried to take advantage of it while we could, knowing that we would soon be plunged into darkness once again.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2278972 2012-12-12T12:40:40-05:00 2013-02-11T05:12:01-05:00

Andrew Sheehan http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-sheehan/
Others fear that the government could be replaced by a more religious and Sunni-dominated regime that would have little interest in defending the rights or the physical safety of members of religious minorities. I have heard of a number of young Christian Syrians who participated enthusiastically in the demonstrations at the beginning of the uprising, but who withdrew their support for the movement as it took on what seemed to them an increasingly Sunni character and as the peaceful protests developed into an armed insurgency in the face of government repression.

Still others seem to have come to support the government as a direct result of their experience of oppression. Some time ago I was watching an American movie on television with a young local friend from a Sunni background who had hitherto only expressed strident pro-government views. At one point a scene depicting an American prison cell happened to come on screen and my friend said that the cell looked nice and that he would like to live in a country where prisoners were accommodated in such conditions. I asked him what he meant by this and he told me that he had taken part in an anti-government protest at the start of the uprising and as a result he had been arrested and spent 40 days in a crowded cell.

There remain other Syrians, however, who seem to maintain a deep ideological or personal bond with the regime, and who believe the narrative presented by the pro-regime media and wholeheartedly support the actions of the regime in its fight against the uprising. Recently I have spent some time speaking to a Sunni woman who is the wife of a military officer and a particularly staunch supporter of the government.

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She told me that she considers herself to be free under the current regime, and scoffed at the idea of herself or the rest of Syria being "liberated" by the forces of the opposition. She sees the constitutional reforms and elections that have taken place in Syria since the start of the crisis as evidence of democratic freedom.

She also contrasts the freedom of Syrian women to choose for themselves whether or not to wear Islamic head coverings, such as the hijab and the niqab, with the situation in countries such as Saudi Arabia in which Islamic dress is mandatory, and in those such as France and Turkey where the wearing of such garments has at times been restricted.

Having visited Europe, and apparently having been struck by the seeming ubiquity of closed-circuit surveillance cameras, she expresses skepticism at the genuine level of freedom enjoyed by citizens in such countries.

Like many supporters of the regime, she considers the revolution to be entirely the result of a conspiracy orchestrated by the United States and Israel alongside various European countries and their middle-eastern allies such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey.

Their aim is to bring down the government and change Syria from a "Resistance" state allied with Iran and Hezbollah, to one compliant with the interests of the west. These foreign powers have been assisted in their designs by numerous Syrian traitors, such as the defectors Manaf Tlass and Riyad Hijab.

She sees the various armed opposition units as leaderless and murderous groups of Islamic extremists that seek to create sectarian divisions in a previously harmonious Syria, so as to facilitate the regional designs of western imperialist powers. The ranks of these groups have been swollen, she has heard, by the actions of countries such as Libya, who have emptied their prisons of Islamist fighters and sent them to Syria.

Given the nature of the armed groups, then, it is only natural that the government respond as it has, and as any other government would in such circumstances -- with unyielding force. Should so much as one bullet be fired from a building at government forces, she told me, then it is only right that that building be levelled.

This particular woman also expressed skepticism with regard to the victims of the civil war. The beggars, for example, that have proliferated on the streets of Damascus as the crisis has continued to eat away at Syria's economy are not as they seem, but are instead paid agents of the opposition, deployed to fool foreign journalists and to create an exaggerated air of chaos and misery in the city.

The many refugees, meanwhile, who have fled Syria to escape the violence and have taken refuge in camps in neighbouring countries such as Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, are not, apparently, genuine refugees. Instead they are merely the relatives of the armed insurgents who were sent outside the country in order to be safe from government retribution. The real refugees are those who have become displaced inside Syria, their love for their country being such that rather than flee their homeland they have sought refuge in parts of Syria that have so far remained safe.

It is not clear how regime supporters such as this woman will reconcile themselves to a new government should, as seems increasingly likely, the Assad regime eventually fall. For the most part it seems that they refuse to even countenance such an eventuality, instead maintaining, at least outwardly, a defiant faith in the strength of the regime and its military and in their ability to prevail against their opponents, both foreign and domestic.

Another regime-supporter I know claims to be able to sense that things are starting to turn in favour of the regime, while the other day the owner of my house told me that everything should start to calm down after a couple of weeks.

]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2176008 2012-11-23T14:51:20-05:00 2013-01-23T05:12:01-05:00

Andrew Sheehan http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-sheehan/
On my way home through the old city I often take a short cut through an archway and along a narrow lane. Like many others in Damascus' labyrinthine old quarters, it passes underneath a number of houses, and at other places is so narrow that the houses on either side seem to converge above it, so even during the day it is dark and gloomy throughout its length.

This particular lane ends about a block from the Umayyad Mosque, near a traditional bathhouse and a small perfume shop. It is beside this perfume shop that for the last few weeks there has been an improvised checkpoint consisting of a couple of soldiers sitting on plastic chairs and checking peoples' documents.

One day the pair of young soldiers that were stationed there saw me as I walked past and called me over, asking for my identification. I handed my passport to one of them and he flicked through it and then, presumably more accustomed to the identity cards that all Syrians must carry and unable to read English, held it up before me and asked me what it was. The other soldier laughed at him and called him a donkey, and the two of them traded good-humoured insults for a minute. After asking me about my business in Syria and checking through my bag, they sent me on my way.

A short distance away is the shrine of Saida Ruqayya -- an important place of pilgrimage for Shiite Muslims. Before, the streets leading to the shrine were frequently packed thick and rendered almost impassable by groups of pilgrims from Iraq, Iran and even further afield, and the nearby shops thrived selling them clothes, sweets and toys.

Now the doors of the shrine are closed and many of the shops are shuttered. The street in front of the shrine is patrolled by plain-clothes security men equipped with walkie-talkies and almost every time I pass my bag is searched thoroughly.

To the east of the Umayyad Mosque there are the remains of the gates to the ancient Roman temple that once stood on the site of the mosque. Against the white stone ruins, on a spot on which the local store-holders used to sit and drink tea and play chess or backgammon on summer evenings, the army has constructed a simple shelter of metal poles and canvas sheets.

The shelter is occupied by a group of soldiers who sit here throughout the day and into the night. They take turns to sit alone a few metres away and watch the passing foot traffic, checking the identity documents of anyone unfamiliar or who seems out of place. Occasionally one of them is sent to collect a pot of tea from one of the nearby shops.

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At other points in the old city, soldiers have erected transparent plastic tents of different sizes in which to take shelter as the weather becomes cooler. One such tent has been placed in the small park located near the corner of Straight Street -- one of the old city's main thoroughfares -- and Bab Touma Street, which leads to the quarter of that name.

The park was once a popular and lively meeting place for foreign students and locals, famous for its mushroom-shaped seats. Now it is mostly empty in the evenings but a few months ago someone decided to enliven it by painting the grey cement mushrooms in bright colours. The soldiers stationed here often stop and search the cars heading towards the old city's eastern gate, inevitably backing up traffic in the one-lane street.

At its western end Straight Street becomes the Souq Medhat Pasha -- one of the Ottoman-era covered markets for which Damascus is famed -- which specializes in clothes and fabrics. Running perpendicular to this market is Souq Al-Bzouriyya, the spice market. At the intersection of the two, soldiers have constructed a guard post that is protected by a mound of sandbags. The emplacement is decorated by a Syrian flag stuck to the wall behind it.

The Souq Al-Bzouriyya is still lively and colourful during the day, filled with damascenes shopping for spices, herbs, preserved fruit and sweets. By night it is silent and all but deserted, but one can still smell the fragrant spices that are on display throughout the day.

One night recently I was strolling through the souq and saw a figure walking slowly ahead of me in the poorly-lit passage, an object dangling from their arm. When I drew within a few paces, he started and turned quickly to face me, watching me closely as I passed. It became apparent that he was a very young and nervous plain-clothes security officer, armed with a Kalashnikov and patrolling the streets alone.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2102165 2012-11-09T17:19:53-05:00 2013-01-09T05:12:01-05:00

Andrew Sheehan http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-sheehan/
A local friend who lives nearby recounted hearing the blast and then seeing thick black smoke rise from the square as survivors fled the scene of the explosion in panic. Despite the loss of life, the explosive did not seem very large -- especially when compared to the device used in the attack on the security office in the neighbouring suburb of Qassaa in March this year.

On that occasion, the explosion shook houses throughout the old city and caused tiny pieces of debris to rain down on the immediate vicinity. This time the bomb, placed in a parked car, destroyed a number of other cars that were parked nearby and damaged a small building, while also shattering the windows of the police station on the other side of the square.

Almost immediately after the explosion the authorities set about the task of clearing up. The following day, the square was clean and seemed normal again. The burnt and mangled cars had been removed and the blood had been washed away.

The only sign of the previous day's attack was the lack of glass in the windows of the police station and the burn marks and structural damage to the small square building located on a patch of grass near the site of the explosion. There was also a small white flat-bed truck parked in the square that had decorated with ribbons and filled with white flowers.

The attack came despite increased security precautions throughout the old city. While it has only been in the last couple of months that security personnel have routinely been seen in the old city, the authorities have been preparing for an attack on the police station in Bab Touma Square for some time. Their increased security provisions over the last year have reflected the deteriorating situation.

As police stations and security offices in the outskirts of the capital first began to be attacked by armed militants, sandbags were placed near the entrance to prevent people from walking on the pavement directly outside. A few months later the perimeter was extended further through the use of crime-scene tape and came to encompass the parking spaces in front of the station.

More recently the police placed metal traffic barriers so as to block the street between the station and the traffic island in the middle of the square, and prevent the passage of any unauthorised vehicles. They also began to post armed guards to supervise the barrier and the rest of the square. Since the bomb attack, the authorities have also begun to station guards at the entrance of the square in order to search the cars that enter.

At the end of that week came the Islamic holiday of Eid Al Adha, and this was chosen by the UN-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi as an appropriate occasion to persuade the warring parties to call a cease-fire. It began promisingly on the Friday, the first day of the holiday, as there was very little audible sign of the shooting or explosions to which we have become accustomed in the last few months.

Early the next day, however, the truce seemed to have been forgotten. At around eight in the morning jet fighters could be heard flying above the old city on their way to attack targets in suburbs in which rebel forces could be found, and the attacks continued throughout the holiday and the rest of the week.

Over the last couple of weeks jet fighters seem to have almost completely replaced helicopters in the skies over Damascus, apparently because the rebel forces have developed the capacity to shoot down the lower-flying and slower rotor-winged craft and it is no longer safe for them to be deployed against rebel held areas. The jets are louder than the helicopters but they fly too high over the old city to be seen, before descending upon their target.

One area that has lately been under frequent attack is that of Jobar and on Friday last week the restive suburb was apparently subjected to an especially severe bombardment by the Syrian Air Force. One friend from the area that I spoke to told me that his sister had found herself stuck in her house as bombs fell nearby, unable to leave and beset by fear-induced stomach pain.

As the government continues to deploy its military against the insurrection, the opposition responds almost daily with car-bombs and targeted assassinations. On Sunday morning this week a bomb exploded in central Damascus near a large military base and the Dama Rose Hotel.

I passed the area a few hours later on the bus and saw soldiers standing or strolling around outside their base and the hotel in much greater number than usual. Several of them were in full camouflage and were wearing their helmets. A few watched the busy street, their rifles ready, as if expecting an attack from the slow-moving midday traffic.

]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2008816 2012-10-24T12:23:10-04:00 2012-12-24T05:12:02-05:00

Andrew Sheehan http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-sheehan/
In addition to those who have been forced to close as a result of the ongoing violence, many businesses have dramatically curtailed their operations in the face of economic sanctions and the falling value of the Syrian currency, and many others have closed down altogether. This has left large numbers of people unemployed, idle and restless -- all of them eagerly awaiting the resolution of the conflict and a return to ordinary life.

Many young people have become dependent on the capacity of their parents to support them, while many others have been forced to depend on their own savings. I have also heard of a number of slightly more fortunate people that were laid off by their companies and then offered their old job back on significantly reduced wages. Given the situation, and the remote likelihood of them finding another source of income, they had no choice but to accept the offer.

Not surprisingly, conversations with Syrians frequently turn to whatever plans they happen to be hatching to escape the country and find work abroad, or to start working as soon as the situation permits it.

Several people have jokingly asked me whether I have any sisters or other female relatives or friends that might be willing to marry them in order to help them migrate to the west. Similarly, others have offered themselves as full-time carers for any old or infirm relatives that I might happen to have back home.

One friend, a lawyer who once had a busy private practice, has now gone several months without any work and is left fretting about his financial situation as he eats into his savings. He has spent time researching the possibility of migrating to various countries in Europe in one capacity or another. He has recently been in contact with a people-smuggling group that is able to transport him, in exchange for an exorbitant sum of money, to a European country in which he can claim asylum.

Another person I know reached the final year of his university degree before the summer and expected to finish his course in the current academic year. As a result of the crisis, however, the private university located on the outskirts of the city that he attended declined to reopen after the summer holiday. Instead of studying, he now divides his time between watching pirated DVDs on his laptop and trying to find a way to complete his studies outside of Syria.

Given Syria's current international standing, several countries in the Middle East and Europe simply refuse to accept Syrian students, while the cost of living and studying in many other countries is prohibitively expensive for most Syrians -- especially now. Russia -- one of the Syrian regime's staunchest allies in the current crisis -- welcomes Syrian students and offers them reasonably priced tuition, relatively low living expenses and even provides some courses in English.

Meanwhile, over the last week or so the sound of fighter jets flying over the city and attacking opposition positions has become more frequent than ever before. On Friday night there was a heavy storm over the city and the sounds of thunder blended with those of the fighting in a distant suburb that could be heard well into the night.

Several of the most important streets in the modern part of the city centre have now been blocked off and closed to vehicle traffic. The road blocks are guarded by soldiers or armed security men who stand beside the grey cement traffic barriers and supervise the slightly surreal spectacle of people calmly walking to work down the middle of major streets that were once regularly choked with traffic.

As I travelled home on the bus the other day, a number of government soldiers were being transported through the centre of the city in an odd-looking makeshift convoy led by a grey civilian pickup truck. A loaded machine gun had been mounted on the roof of the cabin and it was being manned by one of the soldiers standing in the bed of the truck.

Following them was a yellow panel van with three young soldiers sitting in the back, their legs hanging out of the open back door. Behind this vehicle was a large green flatbed army truck, which had also been equipped with a machine gun on the roof of its cabin, and carried more soldiers in its bed.

The soldiers were all carrying their weapons and wearing their body armour, and some of them were wearing their helmets. Several of them were smoking and most of them seemed to be calmly watching the passing cars as their convoy mingled casually with the heavy mid-day traffic of the capital as it ferried them to their imminent encounter with opposition forces.

]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1942076 2012-10-05T12:28:14-04:00 2012-12-05T05:12:01-05:00

Andrew Sheehan http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-sheehan/
I later learned that the encounter had taken place in Baghdad Street -- a major thoroughfare in the centre of the capital, a few blocks north of the old city. The long street hosts at least one of Damascus' myriad security service offices and as a result has been a target for opposition bombings and attacks on a number of occasions.

The following night I was at home watching Arabic music videos on television with a Syrian housemate and his friend. They started talking about the violence of the night before and it turned out that my housemate's friend lived in the area in which the fighting had taken place.

They were laughing about how one of his older relatives, who is apparently somewhat overweight, had been so unwise as to leave his house during the course of the fighting. He had been mistaken for a combatant by one side or the other and had consequently been shot at and wounded in one of his ample buttocks.

Early last Wednesday morning the opposition staged an attack on the Defence Ministry building in Umayyad Square, which kicked off with a loud explosion. I had only just woken up when I heard the first of what was to be a series of explosions interspersed with gunfire. It was the loudest that I had heard for several months and it was immediately apparent that something big was happening.

Later, a regime television channel screened surveillance video footage of the attack. A truck could be seen approaching the building and drawing to a halt. Before it had stopped completely the driver reached out to press some kind of button and set off a powerful explosive hidden in the truck which obliterated him and a portion of the nearby building. Meanwhile, a cyclist could be seen passing by unharmed on the other side of the street.

When a friend of mine saw this video he immediately recognized the place where the explosion had been staged. A few days earlier he had been passing the same building in a taxi and had seen a soldier friend of his -- who is sometimes assigned to guard that particular building -- standing in that exact spot. Luckily his friend was not on duty on the morning of the attack.

On Tuesday this week the government used its helicopters attack the suburb of Jobar. On their way to their targets a couple of them swooped and turned low over the old city, quite close to my house. Their dark grey bodies stood out against the light grey of the overcast sky, and the odd, metallic grinding sound that their heavy machine guns make as they are fired could be heard clearly.

Meanwhile, in the old city, the military presence has become more noticeable. For months there have been certain places here at which armed men, dressed in plain clothes underneath khaki webbing -- either civilian members of popular defence committees or plain-clothes security agents -- can be seen at night. They sit there on plastic chairs, watching passers-by, and occasionally asking people for their documents or providing assistance with directions to anyone who happens to be lost.

Lately there have also been certain street corners where one would see uniformed soldiers stationed for a day or two at a time. Now, however, these corners seem to be permanently occupied by soldiers, and sometimes by plain-clothes security men as well. The soldiers seem, for the most part, to be in fairly good humour and sit in their chairs chatting to locals and occasionally drinking tea.

While sitting down they leave their ubiquitous Kalashnikovs propped up vertically next to their chairs or lying flat across their laps. While standing up or walking around, though, they often carry them with one hand, and sometimes wave them around or gesture with them, in a casual manner completely at odds with my, admittedly limited, experience of seeing soldiers or police officers in the west handle automatic weapons.

To the East of the old city there is a busy road that tanks and other military vehicles often drive along as they travel between the nearest base and whichever suburb they happen to be fighting in on a given day. Recently, a friend saw a tank drive down this road in a convoy with some other vehicles. On its side its crew had had spray-painted, in big white Arabic letters, "Assad! -- or we destroy the country."]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1897984 2012-09-20T09:41:46-04:00 2012-11-20T05:12:01-05:00

Andrew Sheehan http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-sheehan/
She had been living with her family in the impoverished southern suburb of Saida Zeinab until the outbreak of violence in the capital in late July, when the suburb was infiltrated by opposition forces and consequently subjected to artillery bombardment by the Syrian army.

For a few nights, until it was safe for her to return home, we sat together watching television and drinking tea, while both of us kept an eye on her roaming son to make sure that he didn't stumble into an altercation with the cat. She told me how she and her family had fled from their home in fright as the walls shook from the shelling, and how she had become separated from them as they each sought refuge in different parts of the city.

She and her son spent several days living in a school -- the first time she had ever spent the night away from her family, before being offered the vacant room in my house by the owner, for whom she had worked before her child was born and who continued to assist her financially.

She told me of her concern for the well-being of relatives that she hadn't heard from, as well as for the state of her home. She had heard a rumour that, after the shelling, government security forces had ransacked the vacant houses and stolen everything -- including fridges and washing machines.

This rumour later turned out not to be true, and she learned that her brother had stayed behind alone in their house until the fighting ended. He told her that on one morning he had gone out and had had to step over a dead body that the security forces had simply left in the street near their house.

She sympathized openly with the opposition and blamed the government for the violence. In her view, the residents of all of the suburbs on the outskirts of the capital, along with the rest of the country, supported the opposition, leaving the prosperous central suburbs isolated in their continued support of the regime.

On one of these nights I went out and met a western friend for a drink in the old city. After the first bar that we went to closed for the evening and we were asked to leave, we decided to look for somewhere else to continue drinking. Having wandered around for a while without any success we eventually found a bar that was still open, and went in.

There were only a handful of people inside but the bar was small enough to still feel crowded. The small clientele consisted mostly of young people, with the exception of one slightly odd couple -- a paunchy, balding middle-aged man accompanied a noticeably younger woman with pencilled eyebrows who sat at their table looking wistfully at the bodies on the dance floor.

All of the girls were expensively and revealingly dressed and danced with their male companions seemingly unencumbered by their towering heels, while everyone was knocking back a range of exotic cocktails and shots.

The powerful sound system blasted out a variety of western dance music, such as that of Shakira, Pitbull, Rihanna and J. Lo. -- interspersed with the Arabic equivalent. Occasionally the DJ played selections from a peculiarly Syrian sub-genre of the latter -- presumably soon to become obsolete -- with lyrics praising the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad himself.

This always prompted an enthusiastic response from the dancing clientele, and at one point a girl took a small Syrian flag -- with a photo of the president's head between its two stars -- from its place on the wall and began to wave it around and dance around with it.

Once it became apparent that the two of us were foreigners they took it upon themselves to explain the situation in Syria to us. They all greatly admired the president and described him as "nice" or "sweet" and asserted that almost all of Syria supported him against the uprising.

They also treated us to a recitation of a few of the pro-government chants that used to be heard frequently at pro-government demonstrations. Such chants are generally in fairly poor taste and tend to glorify the Syrian president and the pro-government militia and encourage them in their defence of the regime, or to mock the people of other Syrian cities who have been brutally punished for their support of the opposition.

At around four in the morning the bar closed and we were all turned out onto the street. We walked with some of our fellow patrons to the deserted square inside the old city's eastern gate, where their car was parked, and made our farewells. They told us that they would be back the next night to continue the party. Meanwhile, my friend from Saida Zeinab would be stuck in a house full of strangers, eating food given to her out of charity and wondering when her suburb would be safe enough for her and her family to return to.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1851676 2012-09-04T11:42:59-04:00 2012-11-04T05:12:01-05:00

Andrew Sheehan http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-sheehan/
At times it is the low-pitched boom of artillery fire that can be heard, as regime forces use the artillery stationed high on Jebel Qassyoun, the wide brown mountain that dominates the city from the north, to shell suburbs in which opposition forces have established a presence.

There are also the military helicopters whose long grey bodies can at times be seen passing over the city on their way to attack rebel positions. For the most part it is only the drone of their engines that one hears, but at other times they attack ground targets with heavy machine gun fire, or occasionally, rockets.

Sometimes we also hear other, seemingly random, explosions of varying strength -- perhaps bombs or mortar fire. Some of them sound soft and distant, while others are louder and more startling and feel more immediate and closer.

Then there is the sporadic small arms fire which also varies markedly in sound, depending on the distance and the calibre of the weapon being fired. At times it is a deep, heavy, slow-paced bang, at others a fast-paced soft popping sound.

Last Monday I was woken at around 7:30 a.m. by the sound of an explosion that seemed unusually close, and which I later discovered was a mortar round that fell just outside the old city. As the morning continued an artillery barrage began, this time directed at the suburb of Jobar. The suburb had been targeted before, but a resident of the area that I spoke to told me that Monday saw the heaviest bombardment the area had so far seen.

Meanwhile, in the nearby suburb of Qaboon -- which has frequently been the site of armed clashes in recent months -- an army helicopter was attacking opposition fighters. The rebels succeeded in shooting it down and the stricken helicopter could apparently be seen from as far away as Bab Touma square, as it hovered, in flames, before falling to the ground.

A few hours later the government responded by deploying one of its MiG fighter jets, which I heard as it flew eastwards over the city. A local friend, watching from the safety of the old city, described hearing the jet circle in the distance, before catching sight of it as its fuselage glinted in the sun. He then saw it enter into a near-vertical dive, at the bottom of which it dropped a bomb and pulled away, as a thick plume of black smoke rose from the ground.

The owner of my house waved away my impression that the explosions that morning had been unusually close. He assured me that what we had heard was merely the shelling of the outer suburbs, which, coming as it does from such an elevated position, can be heard clearly throughout Damascus. Another friend also sought to reassure me, telling me, perhaps as much to convince herself as anyone else, that everything just seems close when heard from within the old city.

At times, hours or even days can pass without any audible indication of violence. Even then, however, there are reminders of the crisis and the extent to which the residents of the old city are preoccupied.

On Wednesday evening the city seemed at peace as I strolled through the near-deserted streets of the old city's Christian quarter. Meanwhile, a pro-regime channel was broadcasting an interview with the president, Bashar Al-Assad, in which he spoke about the situation in Syria and his government's response. Every cafe, restaurant and shop that I passed had tuned their television to the interview, and the president's voice streamed out into the otherwise silent streets from seemingly every house.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1828372 2012-08-27T15:47:35-04:00 2012-10-27T05:12:03-04:00

Andrew Sheehan http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-sheehan/
This was a development that seemed to unsettle the owner of my house -- a regime supporter, hitherto unruffled by events, who has been predicting the imminent conclusion of the crisis in the regime's favour since it began last March. Like most Syrians he is accustomed to the presence of the various government security agencies that have long kept a close eye on the country and its citizens, and is familiar with their local representatives.

At the same time, as someone who has often rented rooms to foreign students, he is also familiar with the desire of those same agencies to monitor the activities of foreign nationals. He was there to assist me when, soon after I arrived in Damascus, a security agent came to the house in order to ask me a number of routine questions about my reasons for being in the country and my activities in countries that I had previously visited, as well as seemingly less relevant topics such as my parents' respective occupations.

To have the familiar local faces of the security services replaced by uniformed soldiers, even briefly, was understandably unsettling -- a sign of the conflict slowly drawing closer to one of the few areas of the capital fortunate enough to have so far escaped its direct consequences. He was therefore anxious that I not leave the house that morning and risk an encounter with an army checkpoint, warning that while I was well-known to the local security officials, the reactions of the newly-arrived soldiers could not be so easily predicted.

The next morning I did go out and found that the soldiers were there again, their green uniforms standing out against the mostly grey colour palette of the old city's streets and buildings, and the lighter colours worn by civilians. They were mostly spread out along one of the old city's main streets, but were also maintaining a presence in Bab Touma Square and at the beginning of the neighbouring suburb of Qassaa.

They seemed relaxed and in fairly good humour, and were mostly to be seen leaning against walls or their vehicles nursing their Kalashnikovs and calmly watching passers-by. Some were chatting amiably with locals in side streets, and I saw one young soldier strolling along the street nonchalantly carrying an RPG launcher.

Some of them seemed unfamiliar with the area, though: I saw a couple of soldiers stop a passing pair of girls to ask them which exact quarter of the old city they were in. The next day they were gone, and the old city passed what remained of the last week of Ramadan in its usual state of relative calm, watched over by plain-clothes security officers and punctuated by the sounds of violence in other suburbs.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1811231 2012-08-20T11:12:55-04:00 2012-10-20T05:12:04-04:00

Andrew Sheehan http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-sheehan/
In recent weeks the government has started to provide weapons to Syrian civilians from minority groups that they trust to remain loyal, such as Christians and the Druze, in order for them to defend their local areas against possible opposition attacks. Such people, organized into what are referred to as "Peoples' Committees," maintain road checkpoints at the entrances to their quarters, and, in the old city, patrol the near-deserted ancient streets by foot throughout the night -- stopping any unfamiliar passers-by.

Government forces themselves also seek to prevent the movement of the opposition throughout the city by setting up temporary road checkpoints at various places at night. One location at which such a checkpoint is frequently found is at the north-eastern edge of the old city, just outside the famous Christian quarter Bab Touma. Here, on a busy road between the walls of the old city and the Sheikh Reslan mosque, regime security forces stop suspicious looking vehicles and apprehend suspected opposition fighters.

On this particular night, the authorities staged a raid on a house occupied by opposition supporters in an area close to the old city. Some of the people targeted in the raid attempted to escape and this led to a running gun fight through the city streets that came to an end in Bab Touma square -- one of the entrances to the old city and the one closest to the predominantly Christian quarter of the same name.

Some of the newly armed residents of the quarter became aroused by the sound of gunfire such a short distance away and climbed onto the rooves of their houses in order to gain an idea of what was going on. They saw a group of armed men milling around outside the old city in the other direction, near the Sheikh Reslan mosque.

The residents believed these men to be opposition fighters preparing to attack and therefore opened fire on them. Unbeknownst to them, however, these men were in fact Shabbiha, members of the pro-government militia, who were monitoring traffic on the road passing to the east of the old city. Upon finding themselves suddenly and unexpectedly assailed by unidentified and all-but invisible gunmen firing from the rooves of Bab Touma, the militia men came to believe that they were facing opposition fighters and so returned fire.

The battle between the two groups lasted around half an hour, and while it appears that no one was actually hurt, several of the houses at the edge of the old city suffered minor damage as a result of the wildly inaccurate automatic fire that characterised the gun fight. It was not until the next day that the true nature of the incident became clear and it was realised that the confrontation had been one between two groups on the same side of the conflict.

The officials responsible for the distribution of weapons and ammunition came to the area and spoke harshly to anyone found to possess less ammunition than they had been provided with, for having essentially launched an unprovoked attack on regime forces the previous night.

It seems likely, however, that, by giving arms and ammunition to people whose nerves have already been frayed by months of violence and real or imagined threats against their community, the regime is setting the scene for similar incidents in the future -- possibly with graver consequences.]]>