In Syria, residents return to battered town retaken by government
The Qusair of today bears little resemblance to the one lost to the rebels more than a year ago, with caved-in homes and a town center filled with rubble.
By Patrick J. McDonnell and Nabih Bulos, Los Angeles Times
June 9, 2013
QUSAIR, Syria A line of unmarked cars and pickup trucks ferried weary Hezbollah fighters back to Lebanon on Sunday as stunned residents began returning to this war-ravaged town, in Syrian government control again after a fierce three-week battle that ended last week.
Syrian officials staged a boisterous victory rally amid the rubble, but the town they captured bore little resemblance to the one they lost to rebel forces more than a year ago. Every building within several blocks of the town's center appeared to have been badly damaged or destroyed.
The surviving facades were riddled with bullet holes, evidence of the fierce battles that raged here; numerous buildings had collapsed into heaps of debris. Household items a computer keyboard, a pair of sneakers, a child's coloring book poked out from the ruins.
Each side had used heavy arms in Qusair and it was impossible to say who had done more damage, the rebels or the government.
Still, Qusair has emerged as a potent symbol of the changing momentum of the more than two-year Syrian civil war, and authorities vowed to rebuild the town and restore services.
"We've cut a major umbilical cord of the opposition," Homs province Gov. Ahmad Munir Mohammad, a staunch loyalist of President Bashar Assad, said in an interview.
Qusair had served as an opposition logistics hub for supplies and fighters from Lebanon, only about 10 miles away. Its fall has provided a major psychological and strategic triumph for the government and an equally potent blow for Syria's disparate rebel forces, already facing supply shortages and divisions within their ranks.
Syrian authorities displayed captured weapons, explosives, homemade bombs and brand-new rebel khakis emblazoned with the names of rebel brigades and marked in English as "Made in Turkey" Syria's northern neighbor and a key ally of Syria's opposition forces.
The fall of Qusair marked the latest in a series of battlefield victories for Assad's forces, prompting some analysts to reconsider predictions that he would not last the year. The government declared the town's fall as a "turning point" in the war.
Playing a key role in the battle to take Qusair were militiamen from the Lebanon-based Hezbollah movement. Hezbollah has declared that the fall of Assad, its longtime ally, would pose an existential threat to the group, a dominant political and military force in Lebanon. Hezbollah relies on Syria as a conduit for arms from Iran, a staunch supporter of both the Lebanese group and the Assad regime.
Hezbollah kept a low profile during Sunday's victory celebration, which featured fiery pro-government speeches, crackles of celebratory gunfire and bused-in supporters waving Syrian flags and chanting pro-Assad slogans. Hezbollah's yellow flag was nowhere in evidence during the animated ceremony, held amid the ruins of downtown.
Among the first to return were various families from Qusair's Christian minority, who represented perhaps 10% of the more than 40,000 residents of Qusair. Many arrived to find rubble in place of homes where their families had lived for generations. In front of one row of caved-in structures, several Christian residents profusely thanked a Hezbollah commander for having helped eject the rebels, whom the Christians viewed as hostile to non-Muslims.
"We've come back to our home and we don't have a place to sit or water to drink," said a retired house painter, 66, who gazed forlornly at the battered remains of a pair of adjacent homes where he and his extended family had lived for decades. "I don't understand what kind of freedom [the rebels] were looking for," added the resident, Salim, who, like others, asked to be identified only by his first name for security reasons.
Several holes pierced the gold-colored dome of St. Elias Roman Catholic Church, a prominent structure in the center of town. Inside, the marble altar was broken, the likenesses of saints and Christ were defaced and the walls were filled with anti-Christian graffiti with sayings such as, "The religion of our master will be victorious against all tyrants."
Visitors to the church on Sunday expressed dismay at the sectarian nature of the slogans, apparently scrawled by Muslim extremists among the rebel ranks. Some elements of the Syrian opposition have links to Al Qaeda.
"It's a big shock to see something like this in a church," said Osama Hassan, a government employee and Muslim who was among those walking through St. Elias. "For us, a church is the same as a mosque."
A nearby mosque was also heavily damaged, parts of its minaret having been blasted away.
Residents blamed the rebels for fomenting sectarian differences among a mixed population that had long coexisted seamlessly.
"Here, the Christian and Muslim cemeteries are right next to each other," said one resident. "We never had divisions."
The rebel takeover more than a year ago had prompted most of Qusair's residents to flee. But several thousand remained, residents said, among them a petite 70-year-old woman who couldn't hide her smile Sunday though she said she had lost more than 40 pounds, and appeared extremely thin.
"This feels like a wedding day for me," said the woman, who declined to give her name. "We mostly stayed in our houses and didn't leave."
A few blocks away, a family sat on a stone ledge and stared at the blasted remains of its home. One woman said she had saved for years in her jobs as a hairdresser and manager of a wedding-supply store to purchase a pair of buildings.
"I had hoped my sons would live in them and wouldn't have to work as hard as I did," said the woman, Rabah. "This was the work of a lifetime. Now it's gone."
There has been no official word on casualties in the battle for Qusair, but residents and others interviewed indicated that the toll was high on both sides in days of street fighting to push back rebel forces. One Hezbollah commander said privately that 80 of the Lebanese militiamen had been killed in the battle, but Hezbollah has not confirmed how many of its fighters were lost. Nor have the Syrian government or the opposition command given casualty figures.
Bulos is a special correspondent.
In Syria, residents return to battered town retaken by government - latimes.com
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United for reconciliation with Muslims, Christians return to al-Qusair
For months, the town's 3,000 Christians lived in neighbouring villages. The first families arrived in the city shortly after the ouster of Islamic extremists by the regime. Muslims themselves accuse the rebels of stirring sectarian hatred in Syria. Along with the shrine of St Elijah, the local mosque was destroyed as well.
Al-Qusair (AsiaNews) - After fleeing to surrounding villages and the capital Damascus, Christians from al-Qusair are returning to their homes after almost two years. Many have lost everything; some have started to remove rubble from rooms and rebuild roofs, bringing life back to a city that in recent months had lost more than 90 per cent of its population, going from 30,000 inhabitants to 500.
Sources told AsiaNews that in 2011 more than 3,000 Christians fled the city seeking refuge with relatives and friends. In recent months, the only non-Muslim residents was elderly Catholic couple, husband and wife. "The couple," they said, "did not know where to run. Their only daughter is a Melkite nun, who resides abroad. They were helped by their Muslim neighbours."
Media reports describe Syria as a place devastated by the conflict between Shias and Sunnis, which has also affected Christians. However, for sources the country was really devastated by outside forces, which have taken advantage of the instability and peaceful uprisings of 2011 to pursue their political and ideological agendas, which reached a peak with the intervention of Hizbollah, the Lebanese Shia paramilitary movement, fighting alongside the Syrian army.
Located on the border with Lebanon, al-Qusair was one of the first cities to organise pro-democracy demonstrations against the Assad regime and later set up a national committee to prevent clashes between religious factions.
"These committees," sources told AsiaNews, "saved several villages and towns, preserving them from the wave of Islamic extremism that has been causing destruction in the past few months in Aleppo and other towns in the country."
"In al-Qusair," they explain, "churches and mosques were built next to each other." An example is the shrine of St Elijah, which was recently desecrated by foreign Islamists, after surviving the fighting between local rebels and the army, who have always respected places of worship.
The outrage caused by the al-Nusra militia, which has fighters from 15 nations in its ranks, has aroused the anger of the population.
"It's a big shock to see something like this in a church," Osama Hassan, a Muslim and a government employee, told Reuters. "For us, a church is the same as a mosque."
A nearby mosque was also heavily damaged, parts of its minaret blasted away, he added.
For locals, Islamist fighters are to blame for sectarian divisions in the population, which includes Sunni and Shiite Muslims, as well as Christians.
"Here, the Christian and Muslim cemeteries are right next to each other," said one resident. "We never had divisions." (S.C.)
SYRIA United for reconciliation with Muslims, Christians return to al-Qusair - Asia News
The Qusair of today bears little resemblance to the one lost to the rebels more than a year ago, with caved-in homes and a town center filled with rubble.
By Patrick J. McDonnell and Nabih Bulos, Los Angeles Times
June 9, 2013
QUSAIR, Syria A line of unmarked cars and pickup trucks ferried weary Hezbollah fighters back to Lebanon on Sunday as stunned residents began returning to this war-ravaged town, in Syrian government control again after a fierce three-week battle that ended last week.
Syrian officials staged a boisterous victory rally amid the rubble, but the town they captured bore little resemblance to the one they lost to rebel forces more than a year ago. Every building within several blocks of the town's center appeared to have been badly damaged or destroyed.
The surviving facades were riddled with bullet holes, evidence of the fierce battles that raged here; numerous buildings had collapsed into heaps of debris. Household items a computer keyboard, a pair of sneakers, a child's coloring book poked out from the ruins.
Each side had used heavy arms in Qusair and it was impossible to say who had done more damage, the rebels or the government.
Still, Qusair has emerged as a potent symbol of the changing momentum of the more than two-year Syrian civil war, and authorities vowed to rebuild the town and restore services.
"We've cut a major umbilical cord of the opposition," Homs province Gov. Ahmad Munir Mohammad, a staunch loyalist of President Bashar Assad, said in an interview.
Qusair had served as an opposition logistics hub for supplies and fighters from Lebanon, only about 10 miles away. Its fall has provided a major psychological and strategic triumph for the government and an equally potent blow for Syria's disparate rebel forces, already facing supply shortages and divisions within their ranks.
Syrian authorities displayed captured weapons, explosives, homemade bombs and brand-new rebel khakis emblazoned with the names of rebel brigades and marked in English as "Made in Turkey" Syria's northern neighbor and a key ally of Syria's opposition forces.
The fall of Qusair marked the latest in a series of battlefield victories for Assad's forces, prompting some analysts to reconsider predictions that he would not last the year. The government declared the town's fall as a "turning point" in the war.
Playing a key role in the battle to take Qusair were militiamen from the Lebanon-based Hezbollah movement. Hezbollah has declared that the fall of Assad, its longtime ally, would pose an existential threat to the group, a dominant political and military force in Lebanon. Hezbollah relies on Syria as a conduit for arms from Iran, a staunch supporter of both the Lebanese group and the Assad regime.
Hezbollah kept a low profile during Sunday's victory celebration, which featured fiery pro-government speeches, crackles of celebratory gunfire and bused-in supporters waving Syrian flags and chanting pro-Assad slogans. Hezbollah's yellow flag was nowhere in evidence during the animated ceremony, held amid the ruins of downtown.
Among the first to return were various families from Qusair's Christian minority, who represented perhaps 10% of the more than 40,000 residents of Qusair. Many arrived to find rubble in place of homes where their families had lived for generations. In front of one row of caved-in structures, several Christian residents profusely thanked a Hezbollah commander for having helped eject the rebels, whom the Christians viewed as hostile to non-Muslims.
"We've come back to our home and we don't have a place to sit or water to drink," said a retired house painter, 66, who gazed forlornly at the battered remains of a pair of adjacent homes where he and his extended family had lived for decades. "I don't understand what kind of freedom [the rebels] were looking for," added the resident, Salim, who, like others, asked to be identified only by his first name for security reasons.
Several holes pierced the gold-colored dome of St. Elias Roman Catholic Church, a prominent structure in the center of town. Inside, the marble altar was broken, the likenesses of saints and Christ were defaced and the walls were filled with anti-Christian graffiti with sayings such as, "The religion of our master will be victorious against all tyrants."
Visitors to the church on Sunday expressed dismay at the sectarian nature of the slogans, apparently scrawled by Muslim extremists among the rebel ranks. Some elements of the Syrian opposition have links to Al Qaeda.
"It's a big shock to see something like this in a church," said Osama Hassan, a government employee and Muslim who was among those walking through St. Elias. "For us, a church is the same as a mosque."
A nearby mosque was also heavily damaged, parts of its minaret having been blasted away.
Residents blamed the rebels for fomenting sectarian differences among a mixed population that had long coexisted seamlessly.
"Here, the Christian and Muslim cemeteries are right next to each other," said one resident. "We never had divisions."
The rebel takeover more than a year ago had prompted most of Qusair's residents to flee. But several thousand remained, residents said, among them a petite 70-year-old woman who couldn't hide her smile Sunday though she said she had lost more than 40 pounds, and appeared extremely thin.
"This feels like a wedding day for me," said the woman, who declined to give her name. "We mostly stayed in our houses and didn't leave."
A few blocks away, a family sat on a stone ledge and stared at the blasted remains of its home. One woman said she had saved for years in her jobs as a hairdresser and manager of a wedding-supply store to purchase a pair of buildings.
"I had hoped my sons would live in them and wouldn't have to work as hard as I did," said the woman, Rabah. "This was the work of a lifetime. Now it's gone."
There has been no official word on casualties in the battle for Qusair, but residents and others interviewed indicated that the toll was high on both sides in days of street fighting to push back rebel forces. One Hezbollah commander said privately that 80 of the Lebanese militiamen had been killed in the battle, but Hezbollah has not confirmed how many of its fighters were lost. Nor have the Syrian government or the opposition command given casualty figures.
Bulos is a special correspondent.
In Syria, residents return to battered town retaken by government - latimes.com
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
United for reconciliation with Muslims, Christians return to al-Qusair
For months, the town's 3,000 Christians lived in neighbouring villages. The first families arrived in the city shortly after the ouster of Islamic extremists by the regime. Muslims themselves accuse the rebels of stirring sectarian hatred in Syria. Along with the shrine of St Elijah, the local mosque was destroyed as well.
Al-Qusair (AsiaNews) - After fleeing to surrounding villages and the capital Damascus, Christians from al-Qusair are returning to their homes after almost two years. Many have lost everything; some have started to remove rubble from rooms and rebuild roofs, bringing life back to a city that in recent months had lost more than 90 per cent of its population, going from 30,000 inhabitants to 500.
Sources told AsiaNews that in 2011 more than 3,000 Christians fled the city seeking refuge with relatives and friends. In recent months, the only non-Muslim residents was elderly Catholic couple, husband and wife. "The couple," they said, "did not know where to run. Their only daughter is a Melkite nun, who resides abroad. They were helped by their Muslim neighbours."
Media reports describe Syria as a place devastated by the conflict between Shias and Sunnis, which has also affected Christians. However, for sources the country was really devastated by outside forces, which have taken advantage of the instability and peaceful uprisings of 2011 to pursue their political and ideological agendas, which reached a peak with the intervention of Hizbollah, the Lebanese Shia paramilitary movement, fighting alongside the Syrian army.
Located on the border with Lebanon, al-Qusair was one of the first cities to organise pro-democracy demonstrations against the Assad regime and later set up a national committee to prevent clashes between religious factions.
"These committees," sources told AsiaNews, "saved several villages and towns, preserving them from the wave of Islamic extremism that has been causing destruction in the past few months in Aleppo and other towns in the country."
"In al-Qusair," they explain, "churches and mosques were built next to each other." An example is the shrine of St Elijah, which was recently desecrated by foreign Islamists, after surviving the fighting between local rebels and the army, who have always respected places of worship.
The outrage caused by the al-Nusra militia, which has fighters from 15 nations in its ranks, has aroused the anger of the population.
"It's a big shock to see something like this in a church," Osama Hassan, a Muslim and a government employee, told Reuters. "For us, a church is the same as a mosque."
A nearby mosque was also heavily damaged, parts of its minaret blasted away, he added.
For locals, Islamist fighters are to blame for sectarian divisions in the population, which includes Sunni and Shiite Muslims, as well as Christians.
"Here, the Christian and Muslim cemeteries are right next to each other," said one resident. "We never had divisions." (S.C.)
SYRIA United for reconciliation with Muslims, Christians return to al-Qusair - Asia News
I get your point though. But as of now such individuals are residing and propagandizing against my people and Islam. At least if something of it was constructive but most of the time it is just nonsense like his latest post aimed to me. Says it all really.
