Syria in ruins: civilians suffer as military stalemate drags on It is bizarre to be an ear-witness to war: to walk the streets of a modern capital or relax in a cafe and every few minutes hear the whine of fighter-bombers in the sky and the boom of artillery fired from somewhere close at hand. You don't see them, let alone their intended targets. Only sound reaches you, leaving the mind's eye to visualise the death and devastation their bombs and shells must be inflicting. This grim and uneasy experience - we are safe, out there others are fleeing in terror or dying - has become the norm for people in central Damascus, though few are really detached since almost everyone has a friend or relative in the outlying districts that are being hit. On my last visit to Syria, in August, the guns on the plateau of Mount Qassioun above the city were not working as hard as they are now. On some days during the week and a half I spent in Damascus this month they were fired a dozen or more times an hour. Often they boomed during the night as well. Sometimes the invisible menace came from machine-gun and rifle fire. I visited a friend for lunch in the Christian area of Qassa one Friday, when the streets are always emptier than usual. But some couples strolled about and one set of parents pushed a pram, even though the air was split by the rattle of bullets. They sounded dreadfully near but in a built-up area noise reverberates and it was impossible to know if they came from 100 yards away or two miles. The firing lasted all afternoon but we learned the cause only later. The armed opposition that controls the district of Jobar just beyond Qassa was trying to capture Abbasiyin Square, a symbolically important traffic hub. In the adjacent stadium the government has placed mortars, artillery and tanks, determined not to lose a focal point often mentioned as a potential Damascus equivalent of Cairo's favourite protest site, Tahrir Square. Damascus city centre may still be untouched by significant violence but the war has destroyed normal life throughout the city. Most roads that pass key government buildings are closed and, along with dozens of mobile checkpoints that soldiers and police erect without warning in order to scrutinise IDs and search car boots, this causes massive transport holdups across the city, making the daily commute an agony of irritation and unpredictability. Wheat production was down by almost 40% last year and, with flour scarce, crowds gather outside bakeries waiting for bread. Fuel is in short supply and drivers queueing at petrol stations may take three to four hours to reach the pumps, unless they are willing to pay double for a jerrycan of black-market fuel. Butane gas for cooking has shot up in price, as has diesel for heating. Arrests and interrogations continue apace. An engineer told me of a 24-year-old man with no interest in politics who was detained two months ago simply because one of his many Facebook friends had uploaded a photo of a Syrian tank. He has not yet been released and his father is rushing between police stations and security headquarters to try to discover where he is held. A friend told me how he was driving with his six-year-old son when a soldier at a checkpoint looked through the car's back window and asked the boy: "Does your daddy have a gun like mine at home?" When the father laughed and tried to make a joke of it, the soldier snapped: "Shut up. I'm asking your son. The father is has no gun so the boy told the soldier: "No." But the incident showed to what lengths the security forces are ready to go. With troops and police busy on this kind of counter-insurgency, normal law and order has collapsed and people complain of a surge in kidnapping by criminal gangs. The secular activists have gone Many poorer Syrians from the conservative Sunni towns where the rebellion began against Bashar al-Assad's regime in 2011 have fled to camps in Jordan and Turkey, but the secular middle class of Damascus is leaching to Lebanon. Peaceful demonstrations have stopped and activists who courageously organised protests in the capital in the first months of the rebellion now throng the cafes of Beirut, some running opposition websites but many lying low in the vague hope the tide will turn. Why do they go? There is no need," one former protest marcher whose sister now lives in Beirut told me with passion. It's bad that all the secular activists have gone. The ones that remain are a bit fanatical. Another former marcher said the tenor of the posts on Facebook is becoming more Islamic. A businessman noted with irony that when it was founded, Assad's Ba'ath party used to have socialist pretensions. "Now," he said, "it's the peasants and workers who are being bombed out of their homes, while the capitalists survive here or find easier ways to escape." Youssef Abdelke, a painter who spent two decades in exile in Paris and returned in 2008, is one of the few Assad opponents who was willing to be quoted by name. He draws charcoal pictures that express Syria's current sadness in elegant simplicity. "The country is increasingly being emptied by the democrats," he told me. It leaves Syria to the regime and the Salafis. People take a risk by staying here but going to Beirut puts Syria at risk. Every conversation is dominated by the rumble of bombing and the misery it causes as the regime seeks to keep control of "old Damascus," the area that lies inside the ring road and where regime supporters' homes and most government ministries are situated. Beyond it, to the east of the city, the rebels have seized a large area of farmland known as the Orchards, where settlements of low-cost housing have sprung up over recent decades. To the south the rebels occupy Deraya and are fighting in Yarmouk, a once largely Palestinian district. When I asked the army why they bomb, the explanation I got was that it bolsters troop morale. It also protects troops from having to go into areas on foot," said a senior government official, now retired. When I said: 'Isn't it collective punishment of the civilian population?', they said nothing. The punishment seems to have two variants. The lighter one was described to me by an elderly resident of Qudsaya, a district about five miles north-west of central Damascus. I visited it during an illegal protest last February when some 2,000 euphoric young people paraded through the main street, shouting: "Down with Bashar!" There was no police presence or any sign of regime reaction. Now every shop is in ruins or under slow repair as owners try to rebuild their livelihoods. The wrecks of burnt-out cars litter the street, and many houses have shell-holes in their facades. My informant recalled the regime's revenge. At 5am one morning in August the government started firing shells and mortars from al-Areen, an Alawite district on the other side of the valley. About an hour later soldiers and shabiha [pro-government militias] arrived and warned everybody they had an hour to leave Qudsaya. Anyone who remained would be shot," he said. With his wife he joined hundreds of frantic families, who fled on foot or in their cars. His 27-year-old son stayed behind with some Druze neighbours who had once worked for the defence ministry and seemed to be trusted by the soldiers. According to the son's account, over the next three days the soldiers and militias proceeded to break into houses and smash the metal shutters of shops, loot TVs and other electronic goods, and then set the buildings on fire. An unknown number of people were executed. Most residents have now returned to Qudsaya, traumatised but apparently having "learned their lesson." The message has gone out to would-be protesters to lie low and to the armed opposition not to come into the area. The same message has been absorbed by people in the districts of Midan and Old Mezzeh, which rebels penetrated briefly last summer before being driven back by a massive army counter-attack. Residents have urged the rebels to keep out and not provoke total destruction. In the capital's eastern districts and the Orchards area civilians had less chance. Rebels advanced and joined local people who took up guns in Qaboun, Douma, Harasta, and Jobar and the government is still responding with the rain of bombs and shells that you hear in central Damascus. As well as collective punishment it amounts to a "strategy of denial." Recognising that it cannot regain control without risking excessive numbers of soldiers' lives, the regime's fallback is to prevent civilians going home under rebel protection and have the opposition proclaim them as "liberated areas" where normal life is resuming. The latest district to suffer from this strategy is Adra, a new zone of industrial investment about 20 miles north-east of Damascus. Half the apartment blocks are incomplete, a forest of raw concrete buildings with no doors, windows, water or electricity. This bleak wasteland now houses at least 100,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) who have fled from the Orchards. A fortnight ago the war reached them again. A military airfield is located near the original village of Adra, where another 20,000 people live a few miles from the industrial zone. The rebels have started to make airfields their prime targets throughout Syria and the government feared armed groups were infiltrating Adra in preparation for an attack. It launched bombing and artillery strikes on Adra on 31 January. On 4 February, some 2,000 families set off on foot to the already overcrowded industrial zone. Volunteers from the Syrian Arab Red Crescent broke the locks of five schools and helped them to move in. According to witnesses, less than 20% of these desperate people are male. They fear the army will assume all males are rebels and arrest or kill them. Loyalty to the regime The key question is whether either side is about to make a military breakthrough. In recent days the rebels have made significant advances in the north-east of the country along the Euphrates. They captured a military airfield near Aleppo. But the government has regained control of most of the strategically more important city of Homs and Damascus seems secure. The front lines around the capital have barely moved for six months and foreign media reporting or opposition websites which use phrases like: "war gets nearer to central Damascus" or: "rebels close in on the capital" create a false image that the regime's fall is inevitable or even imminent. Even the fall of Aleppo would not be a fatal blow. In spite of numerous defections of junior officers and a handful of more senior ones, the army has not suffered any serious morale problems. Its officer corps is 60% Alawite, the minority sect from which the Assad family comes. Western journalists have no sustained access to army thinking but Lebanese reporters who have regularly accompanied the military at bases or on operations say their loyalty to the regime is firm. Hundreds have been killed but this reinforces their determination to avenge comrades' deaths at the hands of what the state media continue to describe as jihadis, terrorists and foreign mercenaries. Loyalty is also maintained by the Iraqi precedent. Syrian officers saw how the Americans, with full support of the new regime in occupied Baghdad, disbanded the Iraqi army, destroying careers and pensions at a stroke. The government continues to pay the salaries of teachers, doctors and its hundreds of thousands of other employees on time. It provides every family with rice and sugar at subsidised prices as it has always done. Where the money comes from, given that oil exports are blocked by sanctions, is unclear but rumours suggest Iran. The result is that in addition to the loyalists a substantial proportion of Damascenes, however bitter towards the regime, fear a rebel victory would bring more harm than good. These fears multiply the more they see the growing dominance of Islamists and Salafis on the battlefield. "The prospect of Bashar stepping down gracefully or being overthrown militarily is inconceivable and unrealistic," a UN diplomat who met the president last year told me before I left for Damascus. The alternative of a negotiated transition is tenuous but preferable, though it would need concerted joint action by Russia and the US. In Damascus many are putting their hopes on Moaz al-Khatib, the leader of the Syrian National Coalition, who recently broke a taboo by saying the exiled opposition should stop rejecting the government's invitation for negotiations. The soft-spoken engineer who used to serve as a Friday preacher at Damascus's famous Umayyad mosque is becoming a local hero. Almost everyone I spoke to supported negotiations as the only way to end a stalemate in which more and more of Syria is destroyed and fewer and fewer people remain on the board.