Syrian city is guarded about relative calm as governor calls for unity against al-Qaida and intense fighting continues elsewhere
A year after this city captured the world's attention as the victim of theworst shelling that Syria's civil war had yet seen, Homs has become a – relatively – safe haven. Hundreds of families who fled to other Syrian cities in fear last February have loaded their belongings and returned. Civilians from Aleppo and Deir el-Zour – where fighting is still intense – are moving to Homs because they have heard it is more livable.
"It's the only case I know of in Syria where people are returning after a long period of displacement. Homs may be quieter than Damascus", Khaled Erksoussi, the head of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent's emergency response team told me in the capital before I set off on the 100-mile drive north. He was right. The boom of heavy shelling, promptly followed by the screeching of birds in panic, repeatedly fills the Damascene sky. It was in full and murderous throat again when I returned. Yet for 24 hours in Homs I heard only a few explosions, apparently directed towards targets beyond the ring road. In the city centre the street markets are thronged with shoppers. Groups of students wander in and out of the university, or stand around chatting. Checkpoints at several cross-roads create minor traffic jams but the soldiers seem relaxed and perfunctory as they check ID cards and car-boots, no doubt happy to be assigned to minor tasks rather than be sent to risky, remote areas. Homs even boasts a number of armed women in uniform who have volunteered for a newly created home guard.
Homs is Syria's third largest city and local officials estimate about 150,000 of its 2,300,000 people are thought to have left and not returned. In human terms the figure is huge but it is a smaller exodus in proportional terms than Damascus or Aleppo have suffered.
The city's strategic position in the centre of Syria's populated belt meant the government could not allow it to fall, thereby cutting the country in half. The minority Alawites, from whom the ruling Assad family comes, have long considered it their capital. Hence the ferocious army counter-attack when early last year rebels captured the Baba Amr district and were on the verge of seizing several other parts of the city.
Now, the Syrian army is back in control of much of the city and government minders took me in without armed escort, though there were four of them, including one man who introduced himself as a local journalist and took a note of all my conversations.
Almost every shop along Musab bin Zubeir street, one of the main thoroughfares, is shuttered and the facades of the upper floors are riddled with holes from shells and mortar-fire, but life is gradually returning. Children ride bicycles on largely empty streets and a few old men in red and white chequered head-dress sit on chairs by their front-doors.
"When people see us living here, they get courage and start returning", said Sahar Rahmoun, a woman who was walking home with her small daughter past a ruined mosque. She had escaped to her sister's house elsewhere in Homs during the height of last year's shelling, she explained.
When I turned into a busier side-street with more people in view the minders were visibly alarmed but they muttered "follow him" in Arabic rather than ordering me to turn back. The first two families I accosted at random turned out not to be original Baba Amr residents.
Qassem al-Khatib and two of his children were loading bags and suitcases into the back of a pick-up truck. He had been in Baba Amr for six months after escaping from a village north of Homs "because armed groups had come in there", he said. The family was moving from the first apartment they had been occupying in Baba Amr to one they hoped would be better a few streets away. "They say there's electricity and water there," al-Khatib said. "We were guests here and we'll be guests there", he said with a smile. It sounded better than admitting they were squatters.
At a corner shop Fadi al-Jouri said the three-storey building had survived miraculously even though the area had come under regular fire from army and rebel positions at opposite ends of the street. Bullet holes and damage from mortars scarred at least half the houses. At the time he was away doing army service but his family hid inside their home for several days.
In spite of the army's advance into other districts, the narrow streets of Homs' Old City remain in rebel hands. They are surrounded by government positions and are seen to have little strategic value. This may be one reason so far they have not come under severe attack.
Another is that Ahmad Munir Mohammad, a lawyer appointed as the provincial governor last August, favours a softer touch. Independent aid agency officials say hardliners in the government and army have criticised his approach; the government is usually reluctant to let supplies into besieged rebel areas. But on 3 November six staff from the International committee of the Red Cross and 28 volunteers from the Syrian Arab Red Crescent were allowed to drive into the districts of Khalidia and Hamidia in the old city with food, baby milk and hygiene items, as well as medical supplies for close to a hundred wounded people.
In an interview the governor said he supports negotiations with the rebels for ceasefires under certain conditions. Unlike most officials, he referred to them not as "terrorists" but with the neutral term "armed groups" or "armed people". His said his policy was to separate the Syrians in the opposition from foreign fighters, jihadis, and the Islamic fundamentalists known as Salafis or Takfiris who reject non-Sunnis as heretics. "I keep telling the militias that all the people of Homs are my sons. We want to follow parallel tracks: military action against the gangs who declare some people to be infidels and social action for the others, by making contact and negotiating", he said. "The problem is not guns as such. The issue is to get rid of guns from people's minds. We ask people to return to civilian life. A number of them have dropped their weapons and joined us in fighting the Salafis and Takfiris".
The governor claimed up to seven thousand fighters were keeping about a thousand civilians hostage in the Old City. But a number of leaders in Khalidia had contacted the government and agreed to change sides to free the area from "al -Qaida," he said.
There was no way to verify the claims but one alleged defector was produced for me. Fares Ghammam said he was with a rebel group in Khalidia until last August. "We had started with peaceful demonstrations and then moved to armed action in self-defence as kind of border-guards to stop the army coming into the district. But then various armed groups appeared, and started fighting for control. There is no single commander and the various groups disagree with each other. Some commanders stole the money that was pumped in to support our revolution, and escaped to Turkey and Germany", he said.
He decided he wanted to leave Khalidia but did not know how. "I was afraid of both sides," he said.
The governor had appointed a reconciliation committee and published its number. Fares Ghammam rang and escaped from Khalidia one night after the army had been alerted not to shoot him. But his troubles were far from over. "The armed groups called me a traitor and put my name and face on the internet.
"As a result I was kidnapped at an armed group's checkpoint at Nabek outside Homs in November. But the reconciliation committee paid a ransom to get me out," he said. He, his wife and four children now live in secret accommodation. He had sent his family out of Khalidia before the government siege began. Until August the army regularly shelled Khalidia. Since the new governor came in, this had almost stopped, he said.
While the rest of his testimony could only be taken on trust, his point that Homs was enjoying a virtual ceasefire was confirmed by many other people I spoke to in the city. Whether this city, which was once a byword for wanton destruction, could one day be a model for the rest of Syria remains to be seen.
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