Will the walls fall? In the rectangular courtyard of the Umayyad Mosque, the heart of Old Damascus, women swathed in black sit and chat on the cream-colored stone floor, polished smooth by the comings and goings of generations. The sky overhead is an identical rectangle of blue. Children chase one another into shady corners, as pigeons swoop in and out, drawn, the women in black like to say, to the holiness of the place. Beneath the remnants of a Roman colonnade, Mohammad Ali, 54, wielding a hefty Polaroid he has been carefully keeping going for a quarter century, shoots a photo of a grim-faced family taking a breather from war-torn Aleppo.
His usual clientsβtourists, foreign students, and well-dressed families out for a strollβare long gone. Today many of the families browsing the bright blue Iranian pottery and bouquets of colorful shawls are Syrians forced from homes in outlying neighborhoods that have become battlefields. In the city center, men with guns patrol the streets; they belong to the growing neighborhood militias that some residents trust and others fear.
Bracing for the unknown, fearing the worst, sinking into economic hardship, the Old City hunkers behind ancient walls that are reclaiming, metaphorically for now, their original role as fortifications. Beyond the walls military checkpoints create another barrier, keeping rebels out of government-held central Damascus. Along French colonial boulevards, in busy vegetable markets, in largely empty nightclubs, there is a sense of waiting within a bubble of provisional safety.
Mortar shells land with increasing regularity in downtown Damascus, attacks that the government blames on rebels. Most of the shelling heard in the city is outgoingβthe odd spectacle of the government wrecking the suburbs of its own capital, many of which have remained in rebel hands for more than a year.
Now it is a citadel from which government troops fire barrages of shells. Much has already been lost. But the singular culture of Damascus, viewed for centuries in the Arab world as a beacon of refinement and civilization, offers one of the few hopes for saving Syria.
