Lebanon is a country of unsettled scores. Each time I visit the country, I keep seeing and feeling the burdensome legacy of its 15-year civil war, no matter how many years had gone by since it ended in 1990. What would I find in neighboring Syria, as its nearly 6-year-old civil war appears to be winding down?
On Dec. 28, as the car I was riding in climbed the road from Beirut to the Anti-Lebanon Mountains on the way to Damascus, the weather turned quite cold. “If so many trucks are heading to Syria, things must have changed a lot,” I murmured, looking at the heavy traffic. “No, they have not,” the driver replied, explaining that most of the vehicles were headed to the nearby Lebanese town of Chtaura. Indeed, after Chtaura, the road became rather desolate, even though the war zones were far away.
The Damascus that greeted us looked nothing like the capital of a country in the grips of a cruel war. With bustling, clean streets that suggest regular garbage collection and daily life running at full gallop, the city can make one believe the coast is clear. This first impression, however, is misleading.
The Damascus countryside remains controlled by armed groups such as the Free Syrian Army (FSA), the Army of Islam and Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra). The war comes to Damascenes in the form of killer rockets fired abruptly from the countryside, water and power cuts that make life unbearable, soaring prices, searches at checkpoints that slow traffic and more than 2 million people displaced from war zones. Still, the city continues to function, and social and economic life remains vibrant.