Syria Crisis: How Violence is Affecting Everyday Life

Violence continues in Syria. On Monday, 23 Syrian soldiers are said to have been killed in clashes in the city of Rastan.

The World’s Laura Lynch has just returned from Syria, where she had the opportunity to ask people in Damascus about how the upheaval there is affecting everyday life.

Lynch says that the violence there has caused some people to move their families to different parts of the city during the weekend, when violence is usually worst.

Others told her that they have put photos of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in their windows as a way to try to dissuade security forces from coming into their homes.

Laura Lynch talks with Lisa Mullins about what she heard from the residents of Damascus.

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Lisa Mullins: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is “The World”. The crisis in Syria is looking more like civil war. The violence today focused on the central city of Rastan. Opposition forces says the city was shelled overnight by the Syrian Army. Clashes followed between the army and activists. The activists say thirty people were killed, twenty-three of them soldiers. The tension in Syria is rising by the day. It’s palpable in Damascus. The capital was hit last week by twin suicide bombings. The World’s Laura Lynch left Damascus this morning. She’s now in London. She was in Syria all last week and spoke with a variety of Syrians about the crisis. Most of them didn’t want to speak into a microphone. They were afraid of repercussions. But some did agree to speak informally about how the crisis has affected their lives.

Laura Lynch: For some of the people I talked to, it meant taking strategic moves during different days of the week. Most of the demonstrations happen on Fridays which are the days when people gather in mosques for Friday prayers, and usually the protests spill out into the street after that and that’s when there are clashes with the security forces. So some people are actually moving their families out of their homes on Fridays and Saturdays to other, what they consider to be safer locations for those two days until things calm down again because they can hear the gunfire. They think it’s too much of a risk to their family, so they get out and then they go back in on Sunday and they’re there for the rest of the week.

Mullins: So people are afraid of the violence. How scared are people of the Assad regime of the government?

Lynch: I think I got a sense of that in talking to one man who is in a neighborhood that he says actually hasn’t had a lot of protests and demonstrations, but it has experienced security agents going door-to-door searching for sympathizers with the opposition, and he would like to see change in his country. He’s not necessarily a big supporter of Assad, but his children are so frightened that they have repeatedly put a picture of Assad in the window of the house to try to deter anyone from coming to their house and searching it. He also says that they’ve put a picture of Assad as the screensaver on the laptop computers so then when the open up the computer, anyone who’s looking at it will see and think that they are very pro-Assad. So that gives you some measure of the fear that exists, and these are in young people. I suspect that that’s true for some older people as well, but the young are feeling especially vulnerable. I did talk to one other man who recounted a really hard conversation he was having with his eight-year-old son who just didn’t understand what was going on in his country. He was trying to explain to him, he asked him, “Why were Syrians fighting each other?” Those basic kind of child’s questions about what’s going on in the country that seem so unimaginable to him, and this man and his wife and his child are now trying to seriously consider whether it’s time to get out of Syria, as are many others. Those are people who have the means to leave Syria and could live somewhere else. For many others that’s simply not an option.

Mullins: By the way, did he tell you, that father whose child asked why Syrians are fighting each other, did he tell you what his response was?

Lynch: He said he was trying to explain it in the most simple terms possible, but it was still difficult for an eight-year-old to understand that there could be people of the same country that were clashing with each other. And he’s still not sure that his son actually understands what’s going on, and he says, “Well, why should he? This doesn’t make sense to those of us who are adults.”

Mullins: Did you speak to anybody who is pro-government? Pro-Assad?

Lynch: Yes, and when you speak to those people, they are not terribly shy about speaking to you at all, on tape or not, and I’ve met several over the days in Damascus who speak fiercely proudly of the president and of his government and how they’ve given Syria so much, a good economy, they’ve given Syria it’s stability, and that the people who are fighting them are thugs, they are foreign funded fighters, and they don’t want them on Syrian soil anymore. They believe that these people have ruined the country that was doing so well. They also say to me that Assad is making steps toward what they consider to be true reform and that he just needs more time. So even they, in their support of Assad, recognize the need for reform in their country. They just don’t want it to happen this way.

Mullins: The time that you were there in Damascus, Syria, did you find, Laura, that it’s a city where you can still get a cup of coffee or go out to a restaurant? Or is it more a city in lockdown?

Lynch: It still is in many parts of the city, large parts of the city, very easy to move around, very easy to go to a nice restaurant and get a nice meal, as you said, go to a nice cafe, get a nice cup of coffee. It seems, if you’re in certain parts of town, that there is no problem at all and you’ll see lots of Damascenes going out and enjoying themselves. But if you look around, and you don’t have to look far, all I had to do was look in the hallways of my incredibly empty hotel, I don’t think I saw another person staying on the same floor as me the whole I was there, you get a sense that the tourism industry at the very least is taking a huge hit in Syria. And it depends on that industry. I saw very few tourist there. There were several journalists around and some businessmen, but, boy, they are really suffering for lack of people coming into the country.

Mullins: The World’s Laura Lynch who has just returned from Syria. Thank you, Laura.

Lynch: You’re welcome.

Mullins: You can find more of Laura’s reporting from Syria, including her pictures of the devastated city of Homs, that’s at theworld.org.

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Read more from Laura here.