As rockets fly in Damascus, last hopes fade

DAMASCUS - Syrian opposition fighters have often fired rockets on Damascus but what was new about the ones that landed on Tuesday this week was that they had been pre-announced on an Islamist website.

"Look at this. They're advertising that they’re going to hit Mezze 68 and al Maliki tomorrow with Katyusha rockets", a Syrian in Beirut told me in amazement the evening before I was to drive to Damascus.

"They're calling it 'the second round' and say it's in reply to regime attacks in the Damascus suburbs.”

Sure enough, next day the rockets landed in the areas mentioned, both of which are considered close to the regime, in spirit and in fact.    

Maliki is near where President Bashar al-Assad has the office he mainly uses. Mezze 86 is an area of modern apartments largely inhabited by Alawites who serve in the security services. 

A third rockets landed near the state-run Children's Hospital causing a huge explosion. 

When I visited the nearby United Nations offices in the Sheraton Hotel shortly after arriving in Damascus, staff were sheltering in the windowless corridors in case a second attack sent more shrapnel flying. Syrian state TV reported that nine people were killed in the third blast, but there were no fatalities in the other two.

"It's the first time the rebels have given warning of attacks,” a local journalist said. "I read it on Facebook.  Everyone was passing the link around.”

She did not treat the message as advice to stay away from the areas, since they are large and no warning of the time of the planned attacks was given.  She saw it as a tactic to intimidate people. It clearly worked. Only six out of twenty five children turned up in her nephew's school class in Maliki that morning. Most parents kept their kids away.

The website announcement was made in the name of a group calling itself "Soldiers of Islam Brigade".  It was one of dozens of groups that have proliferated since the uprising against the government began.

While the opposition tactic of announcing planned attacks is brand-new, their targeting is also a relative novelty.  Massive car bombs have damaged government buildings on several occasions since 2012 but until recently residential areas with their leafy sidestreets in the city centre were almost entirely spared.   

"They want the middle- and upper-middleclass to feel the pain,” the local journalist speculated.  "It has become an almost daily thing.”

The Syrian government line is that the rebels are gradually being pushed out of the districts beyond the ring road which they have held for almost two years.

While it is true that some areas have been wrested back from rebel control, thanks to merciless pounding by artillery and aircraft, new areas have fallen. Kashkul, on the south-eastern edge of Damascus, used to be a typical new settlement of five-storey buildings gradually encroaching on farmland. Some were fully inhabited, others still under construction. Shops were always busy and the streets full of cheap cars and pick-up trucks.

Now the asphalt is marked by criss-cross patterns imprinted by tank tracks, and troops stand beside armoured personnel carriers, awaiting their orders.  From a fifth-floor window Issa, a Christian, pointed across a field to Dukhania, another similar settlement.

Smoke and flames were rising from inside.  The blocks of flats on the front line facing the army positions had been reduced to rubble. We could hear exchanges of small arms fire and the occasional rumble of explosions.  An area which used to house 40,000 people was virtually deserted. 

"It all started ten days ago on the Saturday of the week before last,” Emad said, as he showed us shrapnel holes in the window of his child's bedroom.  His wife and child have fled to relatives in a Christian village near Homs, a hundred miles north of Damascus.  Although Kashkul remains in government hands, the sounds of war were too frightening for them to want to stay. Issa stays in Kashkul to protect his flat from looters.

On guard on the largely empty street, an army lieutenant explained the dynamic to us. "Opposition fighters were suffering in Joubar [an eastern suburb which the government has been trying to capture for almost two years] and came here to open another front. They attacked two buildings and a textile factory in Dukhania.  They told people, 'ISIS are here’.  People were terrified and fled.” He was not convinced the rebels were really from ISIS, and said it could have been a device to create panic. When Syrian state TV reported the incident, they also did not refer to the attackers as ISIS. 

In a safer Damascus suburb, I met several other distraught refugees from Kashkul. Emad is a middle-aged supermarket owner who lost his business in Joubar months ago when he fled to what was then safety in Kashkul.  He described how he became separated from his wife and fourteen year old son in the general panic as hundreds fled Kashkul when the fighting started.  His son was severely wounded in the stomach by sharpnel and now lies in a government hospital.  His wife was also injured and is there too, and Emad spends his time commuting between the hospital and his abandoned flat to check it is not ransacked.

"We are suffering from the government side and from the opposition. Both sides are destroying the city. Both use rockets and both are inaccurate. There is no solution. This will only end when there are no Syrians left", he said desperately. "Too much blood has been spilt. How can there be forgiveness? Some families have lost five members or more.  The situation is terrible.”

Emad's mood of hopelessness is echoed in virtually every conversation with Damascenes.  This is my fifth stay in the Syrian capital over the last three years and each time the atmosphere has become gloomier.  At the beginning most Damascenes were in a collective state of denial that the mounting use of firearms on both sides constituted a war. As the truth dawned, the exodus began and those who could afford it moved to Beirut.  Others fled within the country. In September 2013, on my last visit before this one, the prospect of negotiations in Geneva between government and opposition offered a crumb of hope.

With the talk's failure and the absence of a serious prospect of a follow-up, despair has descended. With it comes a new readiness to talk openly in front of a foreign journalist, albeit with the protection of anonymity.

"I'm like many civilians here who don't care who is in power or who is president.  We just want a normal life with our families in security,” Emad told me as we sat in a friend's living room.

Although he is displaced, his identity papers still say he is a resident of Joubar, which is now under rebel control. "I get badly treated by the army at checkpoints. I'm a Syrian. They should treat me as a Syrian,” he complained.  A neighbour intervened to tell the story of a senior government official whose driver has been missing for two weeks. "There are no rules anymore.  The situation is completely fluid.  The driver's employer has no idea if he's detained or disappeared.  There are lists of detainees but if someone is held at a checkpoint the troops may keep him for several days before he's taken to a place where he is properly registered as a detainee.  Or if the soldiers want to steal his car, they may kill him.  Or it could be criminals or the Free Syrian Army [the rebels]."

Georges, a middle-aged Christian, added the case of a man with a pick-up who transported apples near Nabek on the main road between Damascus and Homs.  "He was late home one day and the family was worried.  They got a phone call from him, saying he had been kidnapped.  His captors wanted two million Syrian pounds [£800].  His brother spoke to the kidnappers to explain they were a poor family.  The price was eventually halved.  But before the money could be collected and delivered the kidnappers released the man but kept his pick-up.  It was worth two million.  This kind of kidnapping is happening in every town and village."

Many Syrians feel their country is a helpless victim of outside forces fighting their own proxy wars.  "There are countries supporting the government, countries supporting the opposition and now we have countries supporting ISIS,” said Emad.

Obama's threat of air strikes in Syria has sparked a new round of speculation. Some think the US president will back off as he did last year after the chemical warfare crisis. Emad believes attacks on ISIS, Obama's ostensible aim, would morph into attacks on Syrian government forces.  But he does not think it will happen.  "Obama won't attack because he knows the reaction will not be good.  If he's crazy enough to do it, there's be a Third World War.” He said he means Russia's reaction.

Reem, a young law student, said, "You can't destroy ISIS from the air. He will have to bring in the Marines.”  But she admits she is not sure whether Obama's talks of air strikes is just "a way to show he's got big muscles" or a serious plan.  She too thinks Obama would go on to attack the Syrian army and Air Force once he starts attacking ISIS.

"Obama's not being fair.  He says one thing and does something else under the table,” she adds.

Omar, a 28-year-old Sunni worker in a restaurant serving shawarma, Syrians' favourite fast food, is sitting with his new Christian neighbours.  He has been displaced three times as the tide of war ebbs in and out of different suburbs. "I'm fleeing both sides. The army uses aircraft, and the sounds are terrifying.  If it goes on another two years, the armed opposition will win.  The army cannot deal with it,” he said. He mentions an incident earlier this week when half a dozen fighters emerged in the inner city area of Midan.  According to unconfirmed reports they used sewage pipes or Hamas-style excavated tunnels.  "How can we be sure they won't use tunnels to get to the city centre?" he said.

He is worried by the new threat from a dramatically more powerful ISIS which has seized vast swaths of land in northeastern Syria along with advanced weaponry captured from both the Iraqi and Syrian armies.  Although like others in the room, he believes the latest rebel attacks around Damascus were done by Jabhat al Nusra, an al-Qaeda-linked group, rather than ISIS.

"Because I'm a Sunni, maybe they won't touch me. But because I live in a regime area, perhaps they will cut my throat. No-one knows what is going to happen," he said.

Some names of those interviewed for this story have been changed to protect their identities.

Listen to our follow up audio interview with Jonathan Steele: