Ground zero in Homs
A plastic chair and a few plastic flowers in the yard of the jesuit monastery in Homs: this is where the Dutch father Frans van der Lugt was murdered in cold blood on April 7th. A bullet in the head, and he was gone: just a few days before an Iranian-brokered deal ended the worst battle of the Syrian war. After months of negotiations more then 2,000 jihadist gunmen were allowed to leave with their light weapons. They vowed to return one day. They engraved it on the walls.
I arrived in Homs from Damascus, where Bashar al-Assad is being re-elected president under tight security measures, with Migs flying over the city, artillery batteries pounding the suburbs and mortar shells exploding even across the street of my downtown hotel.
But nothing compares the misery and devastation I witnessed in Homs.
Little is left in the desolate no-man’s land between the Clock Tower and Wadi Saya. The Christian quarter of Hamidyeh is the ground zero of this bloody, merciless conflict: whole buildings are turned into nothing; mosques, churches, shops, schools, restaurants, banks and houses are empty shells riddled with rockets and shrapnels, wildly ransacked and burned to the ground.
I went inside the damaged but still standing Notre Dame de la Ceinture ortodox church where a priest is celebrating the Mass: the faithful are slowly trickling back, but there’s only a hole where the altar once stood. I walked past crumbled minarets, smashed windows, charred vehicles, shattered homes. The old, ravaged suq is a blackened skeleton. And an eerie silence looms all over the dead city. You can hear the sound of your steps on the broken glass, the clangs of twisted iron bars dangling in the dark of the shaky buildings and the wind that blows through the deserted streets, shreding the sheets and the rag-shields hung across the alleys to thwart the snipers’ fire.
You can also hear the scraping of shovels clearing the debris. Someone is trying to salvage what is left. Yes, someone is coming back to life: an old man is digging in the rubble, a little girl is holding a book, a boy is pulling a bicycle loaded with bags, a woman weeps and prays on her collapsed house.
They pass by speechless, floating like ghosts among the dusty ruins of the battleground.
