Homs, Syria: Inside the City of Fear

[tabatha]

(interesting read)
Nov 28, 2011 12:00 AM EST

It’s an abrupt twist to a conversation as I settle into my seat on the bus from Damascus to Homs: an 18-year-old boy tells me in no uncertain terms to get off, to leave the bus. We’ve known each other just five minutes, Mohammed and I, after he introduced himself while we were loading our luggage into the hold of the bus. I’d invited him to sit beside me at the back. With his shock of curly black hair zipped up in the hood of a stripy cardigan, he looked like the lead singer of a retro boy band. “But why? Why do you want to go to Homs?” he asks again and again. Oh, I don’t know, I say: I’m touring around. This spooks Mohammed, as well it should: Homs, in recent weeks, has become a place of immense peril, the epicenter of an increasingly violent uprising against the regime of Bashar al-Assad.


I don’t want to tell Mohammed I’m a journalist. Journalists are, as a general rule, barred from entering Syria, and definitely not allowed to wander around unsupervised. They are most certainly not allowed to get on a bus to Homs. I don’t want to get the boy into trouble. “Tourists in Homs? There are none,” he says. He looks at me quizzically for a few moments, as if he’s trying to get the measure of me: what kind of Western tourist would be so idiotic as to park himself on the bus to Homs? And then, just as the bus revs its engines, his tone becomes more urgent. “I fear for you, I want you to get off the bus. Get off.” It’s as if he’s only just realized that I must be mad—or a journalist. People are beginning to stare. Almost everyone else on the bus is an old man; maybe young men know better than to take the bus to Homs. The bus pulls away and I shrug my shoulders, but Mohammed is deadly serious. “You can still get off. Get off now.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/11/27/homs-syria-inside-the-city-of-fear.html