Enlisting Damascus Residents to Answer Assad's Call Andrea Bruce for The New York Times The Old City of Damascus has been largely unscathed by war, but a New Jersey man raised there is helping arm and organize new militias to protect the historic district. Hussein Beydoun, top, volunteered to help defend a shrine. DAMASCUS, Syria - Rafiq Lotof strode through the Syrian capital's Old City, past his father's shoe shop, past cubbyhole bars and antique shops, through streets that in normal times would buzz late into the evening with tourists and wealthy Damascus families. But on this recent night, the shops were shuttered, and Mr. Lotof's errand was a wartime one. At the entrance to a Shiite Muslim quarter, Mr. Lotof inspected a new checkpoint guarded by a baby-faced 18-year-old clutching a rifle nearly his height. Fresh from training in Iran, the teenager belonged to one of the growing neighborhood militias that Mr. Lotof is arming and organizing on behalf of the Syrian government - part of a nationwide effort to enlist more citizens in the fight against the rebels challenging President Bashar al-Assad. After volunteering to defend a Shiite shrine south of Damascus, the young man, Hussein Beydoun, said he was flown with 500 other Syrian Shiites to Iran, where Revolutionary Guards trained them to use rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars. Proudly looking on, his mentor, Mr. Lotof, said the heavier weapons might come into play if rebels ever tried to breach the Old City's walls. "If they come," Mr. Lotof said, "they might do anything." Mr. Lotof, a son of the Old City, has returned after years in America for what he sees as a mission to defend its ancient streets, relatively unscathed by two years of war. This area of Damascus, inhabited since at least the third millennium B.C., is for many Syrians the heart of the country. Mr. Lotof and many other government supporters believe the new militias prevent attacks, kidnappings and infiltration by rebel sleeper cells. But some residents fear the militias are bringing the war inside the Old City's bubble of relative security, creating a military target where there was none, projecting a new threat to those who dissent and empowering gunmen who, some say, have harassed merchants and residents. "Once you give a man a gun, you will never get it back," said an Old City merchant who supports the uprising and, like many people interviewed, declined to be identified for his safety. Across Syria, the militias have been one of the chief controversies of a war that has killed more than 100,000 people. Early in the uprising against Mr. Assad, pro-government gangs known as shabiha attacked demonstrators. As the protest movement became an armed conflict, pro-government militias expanded, fighting alongside security forces, and were accused of massacring civilians and of intimidating even government supporters. Over the past year, the government has sought to formalize the militias under a structure called the National Defense Forces. Mr. Lotof and several government officials said they were now being armed and registered under the direct control of Mr. Assad's presidential office. The goal, Mr. Lotof said, is to curb abuses and tap Syrians who are unwilling to serve in faraway provinces but who want to defend their own neighborhoods. Some militias sprang up spontaneously to defend neighborhoods, he said. "Some of them started to do bad things," he said. So they are being organized. Mr. Lotof and others close to the government confirmed what the rebels and American officials have long said: Mr. Assad's allies Iran and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah are providing training and logistical support for the militias. For critics, the support of those Shiite entities has bolstered a view that the militias are sectarian, pitting members of the president's Alawite sect - an offshoot of Shiism - as well as members of Syria's much smaller Shiite minority against the mostly Sunni uprising. Mr. Lotof, however, said that groups from different sects had signed up to defend against rebels they view as sectarian extremists and criminals. Indeed, several Sunnis whom Mr. Lotof had helped release from jail said they had recanted pro-opposition views that had landed them there, formed a militia with Mr. Lotof's help, and were now armed and patrolling a Sunni enclave of the Old City.