Flying bullets

It’s not easy to venture into Damascus’s suburbs without the minder. It’s dangerous and you do it at your risk. But I have a smart driver, he knows where and when and has some contacts. We were in Saydat Zeinab to interview Ruhla, a young woman who fled a village near Homs. Four months old Wael sleeps on the sofa and his two years older brother plays around the empty room and watch my camera: he knows his father went to paradise. Ruhla was pregnant when his husband, a worker, was killed at a check point by a round of bullets from a speeding car. “We lost everything” she says with no tears in her eyes. “The house, the land, the tractor”. She says her father was wounded in the back and her twelve years old cousin was hanged to death. No way to verify, of course.

This is the sacred place where Ali’s daughter is buried and where the shia cleric Abd al-Quddus Jbara was gunned down four days ago: at the Imam Khomeiny Hospital we see his badly wounded brother, unconscious, with a bullet still in his head. The Shias are worried. And the Christians alike. They fear the uprising could turn into a sectarian conflict. They start talk of ethnic cleansing.

Then we hear of renewed heavy clashes with several casualties in Qudsaya. We can’t go there so we head to Zabadani. The village lies in the green Barada river valley, facing the barren hills that mark the Lebanese borders. It’s a hot spot. It was taken over by the insurgents last December, then the army went in to regain control. Tanks are deployed outside the village and I see machine guns behind sand bags in fortified positions on the rooftops as we pass eight military check points before reaching the place. Nobody walks in the streets. The frontline is 400 metres down the road at the bridge. And here are the shebab. I meet some of them in a private house. They say most of the locals support the struggle. And that there is fighting every night: “Each night we demostrate against the government. No matter if they use their tanks. We believe in God, and God is on our side”.