The taxi pulled up to the curb near Bab Touma, and it was clear, even before it came to a halt, that this place, in the Christian quarter of Damascus and one of the oldest parts of the city, was not the same as it had been in the late summer of 2011, just a few months into the uprising, when I was last here. But then, why would it be?
That Syria is gone, replaced by a country of shards. No corner of this ancient land is untouched by the war, now almost three years old. It has left over a hundred and twenty thousand dead, at least half a million wounded, and displaced close to a third of the population. It’s most obvious in the northern belt bordering Turkey, seeping south and east toward the Iraqi border, where many towns and villages have been pulverized by regime airstrikes and artillery, and where even colors seem to have died. Gray, red and black predominate: the mounds of gray rubble that were once homes, the red of so much blood spilled, the black Islamist banners of many rebel units, flying alongside or instead of the more secular three-starred revolutionary flag.