In Homs, the war destroyed the old city and left many of the modern suburbs intact. In Aleppo, to which the war came late – many of its proud merchant families believed that its educated population and trading history would spare the city – the conflict burned its way into the ancient bazaar and destroyed the 11th century Great Mosque, whose minaret collapsed with such terrifying velocity that, so one resident told me, “the vibration felt as if the world was coming to an end.”
But Damascus was blessed – and cursed—by the opposite phenomenon. While its suburbs were erased or smashed beyond recognition amid a welter of shells, sniping and barrel-bomb attacks, its ancient heart beats on, the Umayad Mosque and the Roman columns and the tunnel pathways of the soukhs preserved, its people – those who live in the middle-class homes of Melki and Mezze or who cling to the ‘normality’ of the apartment blocks around the inner city – weirdly cocooned against destruction. In the ring of poverty that surrounds the capital, the men, women and children of Damascus died or fled the pestilence of civil war.
People – most people, I think – believe in the law. Not the party edicts or dictatorial commands which have been inflicted on Damascus for centuries, but the regulations which persuade them that their civilization can be preserved amid chaos. Thus my driver tells me quietly that he would be grateful if, like him, I wear my seat belt in the car. And the shopkeepers near the old hotel in which Lawrence of Arabia held his fateful meeting with General Allenby in 1918 – where Lawrence expressed his ignorance of Allied plans to hand Syria to France – refuse to accept my dollars for a pair of new shoes. The steadily falling Syrian pound, which lost 40 pounds to the dollar on the black market when I was there, must be preserved, albeit that a squad of government intelligence officers is on hand if venality wins over patriotism.