The mechanic, blinded in one eye by shrapnel, spent three days searching for his family in the destroyed buildings and broken streets of Darayya. Finally he found his father’s body in a farmhouse, alongside those of three boys, already starting to decay. ‘Can you tell me why they would kill an old man?’ he asked, before adding: ‘This is not my Syria. When I see the sorrow that happens in our towns, all I think is — this is not my Syria.’
Yet it is. Indeed, one mystery of the darkness that has descended on Syria is that so many gut-wrenching depravities could befall a place of such bewitching beauty, history and apparent tolerance. Even now, after so much blood spilt and so many lives destroyed, there seems something unreal about how demands for democracy ended up in such a sordid maelstrom of death, devastation and sectarian horrors.
The veteran war correspondent Janine di Giovanni does not solve the conundrum.
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