For miles around, as far as the eye can see, the eastern suburbs of Damascus are a sea of undulating rubble and skeletal ruins. Part of this razed moonscape was once the bustling neighbourhood of Jobar, close to the city centre. For seven years it lay on the front line of a civil war.
I tripped over chunks of broken breezeblock and slipped down mounds of pulverised concrete scree as I followed Fadi Ghazi, a local estate agent – in so far as you can be one here – who was guiding me through tunnels he had dug for forces opposed to the regime of Bashar al-Assad. He scrabbled ahead, pointing out landmarks: the burnt-out tower block that had served as a sniper post, graffiti on a bullet-pocked wall that mocked opposition fighters as the “dogs of freedom”.
Ghazi joined the revolution after a mortar killed his brother in 2012. “When I pass by the place where he was killed,” he said, “I can still see his blood stain on the wall.” Now he looks lean and crabbed, with a nose like a raven’s beak and a red-prickled face with one cheekbone that jutted out farther than the other – the result, he said almost cheerfully, of being beaten in prison. He lifted up his shirt to show torture scars pitted across his back. One of his wrists had been stoved in by a bullet. “And I lost all my teeth,” he said, opening his mouth to show his bare gums. Many others had it worse: “There is no one around here not injured.” In between cigarettes, he coughed lugubriously, heaving up a lot of
phlegm. | | |
