After the autumn of Bashar al-Assad, Afaf Mohammed did what she couldn’t for greater than a decade: she climbed Mount Qasyun to admire a sleeping Damascus “from the sky” and watch the solar rise.
By the lengthy years of Syria’s civil struggle, which started in 2011 with a authorities crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, folks weren’t allowed entry to the mountain.
However now they will return to look down once more on their capital, with its high-rise accommodations and poor suburbs exhausted by struggle.
When evening falls, lengthy queues of automobiles slowly make their means up a twisting highway to a brightly lit corniche on the summit.
As soon as there, they will chill out, take heed to music, eat and drink, and, inevitably, take selfies.
On some evenings there have even been firework shows.
Afaf Mohammed informed AFP that “in the course of the struggle we weren’t allowed as much as Mount Qasyun. There have been few public locations that had been actually accessible.”
At her ft, the panorama of Syria’s capital stretched far and vast. It was the second time in weeks that the dentist in her thirties had come to the mountaintop.
– Very best for snipers –
Her first was simply after a coalition of Islamist-led rebels entered town, ousting Assad on December 8.
On that event she got here at daybreak.
“I can not describe how I felt after we had gone by means of 13 years of hardship,” she stated, wrapped shut in an abaya to keep off the chilly breeze.
Qasyun was off limits to the folks of Damascus as a result of it was a super location for snipers — the good view contains elegant presidential palaces and different authorities buildings.
It was additionally from this mountain that artillery items for years pounded rebel-held areas on the gates of the capital.
Mohammed believes the revolution introduced “an exceptional freedom” that features the proper to go to beforehand forbidden locations.
“Nobody can cease us now or block our means. Nobody will hurt us,” she stated.
Patrols from the safety forces of Syria’s new rulers are in proof, nevertheless.
They appear on as a boy performs a tabla drum and younger folks on folding chairs puff from water pipes as others dance and sing, clapping their arms.
Every little thing is good-natured, reflecting the environment of freedom that now bathes Syria because the finish of Assad rule.
Gone are the stifling restrictions that after dominated the folks’s lives, and troopers not throng town streets.
– Sizzling drinks and snacks –
Mohammad Yehia, in his forties, stated he as soon as introduced his son Rabih as much as Mount Qasyun when he was small.
“However he does not bear in mind having been right here,” he stated.
After Assad fell, his son “requested if we might be allowed to go up there, and I stated, ‘In fact’,” Yehia added.
In order that they got here the subsequent day.
Yehia is aware of the place effectively — he used to work right here, serving scorching drinks and snacks from the again of a van to onlookers who got here to admire the view.
He prides himself on being one of many first to return again once more, greater than a decade later.
The closure of Mount Qasyun to the folks of Damascus robbed him of his livelihood at a time when the nation was in financial freefall below Western sanctions. The struggle positioned a yoke of poverty on 90 p.c of the inhabitants.
“We had been on the suffocation level,” Yehia informed AFP.
“Even in the event you labored all day you continue to could not make ends meet.
“That is the one place the place the folks of Damascus can come and breathe a little bit. It is a spectacular view… it may possibly make us overlook the concerns of the previous.”
Malak Mohammed, who got here up the mountain along with her sister Afaf, stated that on returning “for the primary time since childhood” she felt “immense pleasure”.
“It is as if we had been getting our entire nation again,” Malak stated. Earlier than, “we had been disadvantaged of every little thing”.
