It will take Syria a little while to catch up with itself - the end of the regime came so quickly few were prepared.
It will take Syria a little while to catch up with itself – the end of the regime came so quickly few were prepared.One week on from the fall of Bashar al-Assad, we went to the clocktower in Homs, Syria’s third city, where people used to gather to demonstrate at the beginning of the revolution. In April 2011, regime forces shot randomly into the crowd, killing hundreds. It was a seminal massacre, one of the acts of cruelty that made Syrians abandon peaceful protest and pick up weapons to fight.
One was Christian, another a Sunni Muslim and a third didn’t say. A woman with short black hair came over to join us. All were keen to impress on us that they wanted Syria to be what they called “a civil state”, where everyone could practice his or her religion freely, not the enforced secularism of Assad’s Baath Party nor the Islamism espoused by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the armed group that swept down from northern Syria and toppled the regime.
The previous day we had been to Baba Amr, a Homs neighbourhood which had endured an almost complete siege from November 2011 until March 2012. Always an opposition stronghold, many of its men had joined the Free Syrian Army that took up arms against the regime. My friend Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times, and the French journalist Remi Ochlik were killed in a regime mortar attack on Baba Amr in February 2012. A 2019 US court verdict said Marie had been targeted.
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