In his restaurant in Abou Roumaneh, an upmarket district close to one of the Syrian capital’s few luxury hotels, Mohamed Takki looks on as customers pour in.
Business has been good since the first wave of Gulf tourists fled the bombardment in Lebanon, packing Damascene hotels and triggering a mini-boom in the city’s tourist business. Yet there’s more to it than a bit of extra cash.
“I came in one morning to find a Lebanese pharmacist and his family waiting to drink tea,” says Takki. “They’d just run away from Beirut and didn’t have anywhere to stay. All the hotels were fully-booked and they couldn’t find a flat, so I insisted they stay at my house. You have to help: you have this humanitarian feeling.”
Takki is only one of thousands of Syrians who is hosting a stranded family. A sense of popular solidarity with the Lebanese – perhaps surprising given the frosty relations which the two countries have endured in recent years – is one Syrian reaction to the war between Hizbullah and Israel.
Other reactions have included defiance, anxiety, anger, and perhaps most importantly a quietly content realization that Syria’s embattled international status can only be strengthened by the fighting in Lebanon and northern Israel.
Lending a hand
Just over two weeks after the Israelis began their bombardment, some 160,000 people had come across the border from Lebanon. Most were Lebanese, with many hundreds of families still crossing into Syria at the time of going to press.
Syrian immigration authorities have waived visa requirements for all citizens coming across from Lebanon – including US nationals, who were previously unable to get a visa at the border – and have also opened the country’s airports and ports to aid being shipped in from abroad.
Those who could get out of Lebanon earlier – Gulf tourists, wealthier Lebanese and western nationals who chose to make a run for it rather than wait for their governments to evacuate them – flew home as soon as possible from a chaotic Damascus airport or drove south through Jordan to the Arabian peninsula.
But poorer families, mainly from ravaged Shia areas in the Beirut suburbs, South Lebanon and the Bekaa valley, continue to filter across.
Most have made the journey by a combination of walking and hitching rides, a hazardous trip which often took days as exit routes came under attack by Israeli warplanes.
In Damascus, their final destination for the time being, many are sheltering in schools and sports stadiums converted into temporary shelters. Well-organized aid efforts are in motion, with local companies donating truckloads of essential supplies to stranded families and the UN Syria office launching a campaign to raise some $13.6 million in flash funds.
The local Syrian Red Crescent has been especially active, campaigning for locals to give blood, make donations, and host homeless families. It has also set up a dedicated helpline for anyone stranded in Syria.
“Private sponsors came to us immediately to help,” says Khaled Erksoussi, vice president of the Damascus branch of the Red Crescent. “Syriatel and Areeba [the country’s two mobile phone companies] gave us every square inch of their advertising space in Damascus, whilst Bank Audi Syria opened an account for us to receive donations. The speed of the response has been really surprising.”
Damascenes have been receiving SMS messages urging them to help out, while the Red Crescent has printed 100,000 awareness leaflets and continues to send food and medical supplies by truck to the Syrian-Lebanese border – at least, through those border crossings which are still intact.
Standing and staring
Popular support for Hezbollah has been overt. Even ignoring the predictably exaggerated state-organized demonstrations – the Ministry of Information, for instance, claimed that “millions” turned out in central Damascus to wave flags and chant slogans – Nasrallah’s face is in shop fronts, on taxi windscreens, on the tip of people’s tongues.
Yet there has been no sense of panic that Syrian targets are next in Israel’s often random sights.
“I think what’s happening in Lebanon is terrible,” said 28-year- old Mohamed Arafi, who works in a small family-owned textiles company in Damascus. “But Syria is a strong country and is not afraid of Israel. It can defend itself, and I think that the international circumstances don’t allow Israel to attack us, either now or later. We have powerful friends who are with us.”
Pre-eminent amongst these chums is, of course, Iran, whose loudmouthed president has warned Israel against widening its assault to Syria. Iranian foreign minister Manuchehr Mottaki has also been in town to hold talks with President Assad.
Although there has been no statement from the Syrian president, the ruling Baath Party and various ministers have condemned the Israeli attack. The official line has been two-pronged, on the one hand promising a swift response if Syria was attacked, and on the other making it plain that Damascus is ready to open dialogue with Washington.
Syria has also clashed with those Arab nations who have been less vocal in their condemnation of Israel. State-run daily Tishreen slammed what it called the “shameful silence” from the Arab world, whilst foreign minister Walid al-Muallem allegedly sparred with his Saudi counterpart at an emergency Arab League meeting in Cairo shortly after the Israeli assault began.
Yet in a reflection of how Syria is set to be strengthened from the Lebanese conflict, Damascus is courting friends.
In late July, Assad met Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Alexander Sultanov – Moscow being one of the few vocal critics of the Israeli response. Assad has also been on the phone to Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with brewing anti-US sentiment in Turkey likely to send out warning signals to anyone listening in Washington.
In the driving seat?
Many argue that the war in Lebanon is the best thing that has happened to Damascus for a long time. After heavy international pressure and general discredit following Hariri’s assassination in February 2005, which resulted in the withdrawal from Lebanon and further international isolation, Syria may now have regained the diplomatic upper hand.
A widened Israeli assault here is unlikely; it would stretch military resources by opening up a “third front,” draw in Iran and lead to disastrous consequences for US ambitions in the wider region.
“Iran has the power to ensure that the American project in Iraq fails for good,” said one lawyer and political analyst in Damascus. “It can also threaten to cut off energy supplies and send oil prices sky-high. Israel might have the strongest military power, but power is not just about the military.”
If that assertion is true, then many feel that the US-Israeli axis must at some point face the unpalatable reality of dealing directly with the Syrians.
Many argue that the war is the best thing that has happened in Damascus for a long time…
Syria may now gain the diplomatic upper hand
As a military conclusion between Israeli and Hezbollah remains highly unlikely, some analysts even envisage a US-Syrian “deal.” Such an agreement might end Assad’s international isolation, give him a place at the negotiating table and possibly even halt US sanctions. In return, Syria (and indirectly, Iran) might act as broker for Hezbollah, using its influence to help call a ceasefire and perhaps organise a prisoner swap.
Yet the US president’s inadvertently recorded desire to “get Syria to get Hizbullah to stop doing this shit,” raises the question of whether Damascus actually has that ability.
Few would deny that Assad, as one of Hizbullah’s chief backers, has Nasrallah’s ear, but the extent to which the latter is acting independently of Damascus or Tehran is more uncertain.
This suggests that any eventual agreement would have to encompass the demands of all key parties – Bush, Olmert, Nasrallah, and Assad – so that each could pass off the end result as a victory to his respective supporters.
A huge task, no doubt, yet Damascus now holds a lot of the cards. In the meantime, Syrians like Mohamed Takki are doing what they can to help the beleaguered Lebanese.
