DAMASCUS: Shiite pilgrims from Syria and abroad used to flock to the Sayyida Zeinab shrine outside of Damascus every year to commemorate Ashoura, a solemn day marking the 7th-century martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson.
In the days leading up to Ashoura, the streets would be lined with black and red mourning banners and funeral tents. On the day of the commemoration, black-clad mourners would process through the streets, while in gathering halls known as “husseiniyas,” the faithful would listen and weep as clerics recounted the death of Imam Hussein and his 72 companions in the battle of Karbala in present-day Iraq.
Protecting the shrine dedicated to Sayyida Zeinab, the Prophet Muhammad’s granddaughter and sister to Hussein, from Sunni extremists became a rallying cry for Shiite fighters during Syria’s 14-year civil war. It was often pointed to as justification for the intervention of militants from Iran, Lebanon and Iraq in the Syrian conflict in support of former President Bashar Assad.
This year, after Assad’s ouster in a lightning rebel offensive led by Sunni Islamist insurgents, the Shiite neighborhoods of Damascus were subdued. The hotels that were once brimming with religious tourists were empty. There were no banners or processions.
The faithful continued to observe their rituals inside the shrine and prayer halls, but quietly and with strict security measures.
Violence takes its toll
Syrian Shiites already felt they were in a precarious position after Assad’s ouster. Their fears increased after a suicide bomber blew himself up in a church outside of Damascus last month, killing 25 people and wounding dozens more. Government officials blamed the attack on a cell of the Daesh group and said they had thwarted plans by the same cell to attack Sayyida Zeinab.
In Damascus’ Zain al Abdeed neighborhood, mourners entered gathering halls after going through a search and screening with metal detectors.
Qassem Soleiman, head of a body that coordinates between the Shiite community and the new government, said Shiite leaders had agreed with the state that they would hold their Ashoura rituals but would “cut back on certain things outside of the halls in order for no one to get hurt and for there not to be problems.”
The attack on the Mar Elias Church in Dweil’a “put us into a state of great fear and anxiety,” he said. “So we tried as much as possible to do our commemorations and rituals and ceremonies for Ashoura inside the halls.”
Jafaar Mashhadiyia, an attendant at one of the gathering halls, echoed similar fears.
“The security situation is still not stable — there are not a lot of preventive measures being taken in the streets,” he said. “The groups that are trying to carry out terrorist attacks have negative views of Shiites, so there is a fear of security incidents.”
Worry affects the economy
The absence of pilgrims coming from abroad has been an economic hit to the area.
“There are no visitors,” said a hotel owner in the Sayyida Zeinab area near the shrine, who asked to be identified only by his nickname, Abu Mohammad, because of security concerns. During the lead-up to Ashoura, “the hotels should be 100 percent full,” he said. “The Iraqis normally fill up the area.” But this year, they didn’t come.
His economic woes predate Assad’s fall. In the months before the rebel offensive in Syria, a low-level conflict between Israel and the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah escalated into a full-scale war in Lebanon. Hundreds of thousands fled from Lebanon across the border into Syria to escape the bombardment, with many of them staying in the hotels in Sayyida Zeinab at discounted rates, Abu Mohammad said.
A guard at a checkpoint in Sayyida Zeinab, who gave only his nickname, Abu Omar, in accordance with regulations, said he had seen no security issues in the area since the fall of Assad.
“There are attempts to sow discord and sectarianism by corrupt people who were with the former regime and want to play on the string of sectarianism and destroy the country and create issues between us,” he said, describing them as “individual efforts.”
Abu Omar pointed to a group of local men sitting in chairs on the sidewalk nearby smoking hookah.
“If they didn’t feel safe here next to us, next to a security checkpoint, they wouldn’t come and sit here.”
Soleiman said he hopes that next year, the foreign pilgrims will be back and Shiites will be able to openly commemorate Ashoura, with Syrians from other groups coming to see the rituals as they did in the past.
“We hope that next year things will return to how they were previously, and that is a call to the state and a call to the General Security agency and all the political figures,” he said. “We are one of the components in building this state.”

TULKAREM: In the West Bank city of Tulkarem, the landscape has been transformed after Israeli army bulldozers plowed through its two refugee camps in what the military called a hunt for Palestinian militants.
The army gave thousands of displaced residents just a few hours to retrieve belongings from their homes before demolishing buildings and clearing wide avenues through the rubble.
Now residents fear the clearances will erase not just buildings, but their own status as refugees from lands inhabited by generations of their ancestors in what is now Israel.
The “right of return” to those lands, claimed by Palestinian refugees ever since the creation of Israel in 1948, remains one of the thorniest issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The army said it would demolish 104 more buildings in the Tulkarem camp this week in the latest stage of an operation that it launched in January during a truce in the Gaza war, billing it as an intensive crackdown on several camps that are strongholds of Palestinian armed groups fighting against Israel.
“We came back to the camp and found our house demolished. No one informed us, no one told us anything,” said Abd Al-Rahman Ajaj, 62, who had been hoping to collect his belongings on Wednesday.
Born in Tulkarem camp after his parents fled what is now the Israeli city of Netanya, about 12 kilometers (seven miles) to the west, Ajaj said he had not foreseen the scale of the Israeli operation.


It began with a raid on the northern West Bank city of Jenin, a longtime stronghold of Palestinian militants, and quickly spread to other cities, including Tulkarem, displacing at least 40,000 people, according to UN figures.
Vacating the camp after a warning of a raid, “we would usually come back two or three days later,” Ajaj told AFP.
Now left without a house, he echoed the sentiments of Palestinians of his parents’ generation, who thought their own displacement in 1948 would also be temporary.
“The last time, we left and never returned,” he said.
In Tulkarem, the Israeli army’s bulldozers plowed through the dense patchwork of narrow alleyways that had grown as Palestinian refugees settled in the area over the years.
Three wide arteries of concrete now streak the side of Tulkarem camp, allowing easy access for the army.
Piles of cinder blocks and concrete line the roadside like snowbanks after a plow’s passage.


Ajaj said the destruction had been gradual, drawn out over the course of the operation, which the army has dubbed “Iron Wall.”
Beyond the military value of wide access roads, many residents believe Israel is seeking to destroy the idea of the camps themselves, turning them into regular neighborhoods of the cities they flank.
Residents fear this would threaten their refugee status and their “right of return” to the land they or their forebears fled or were expelled from in 1948.
The current Israeli government — and particularly some of its far-right ministers, who demand the outright annexation of the West Bank — are firmly opposed to this demand, which they see as a demographic threat to Israel’s survival as a Jewish state.
“The aim is clearly to erase the national symbolism of the refugee camp, to eliminate the refugee issue and the right of return,” said Suleiman Al-Zuheiri, an advocate for residents of nearby Nur Shams, Tulkarem’s other refugee camp, where he also lives.
Zuheiri’s brother’s house was destroyed last week by the bulldozers.
“The scene was painful and tragic because a house is not just walls and a roof. It holds memories, dreams, hopes and very important belongings that we couldn’t retrieve,” he said.
Each demolished building housed at least six families on three floors, he added.
The land allocated to the camps was limited, so residents have had little choice but to build upwards to gain space, adding an extra story with each new generation.


Back at Tulkarem camp, 66-year-old Omar Owfi said he had managed to make two trips into the camp now occupied by Israeli soldiers to retrieve belongings on Wednesday.
He feared becoming homeless if his home was demolished.
“They don’t care what the house is worth. All they care about is demolishing. We’re the ones losing. We’ve lost everything,” he told AFP.
“They want to erase the camp — to remove as many buildings as possible and leave just streets.”
He said he feared for his children and grandchildren, as they dispersed to live with various relatives.
The Israeli supreme court froze the military order for mass demolitions in Tulkarem camp on Thursday, giving the state two months to answer a petition against them, said the Palestinian human rights group Adalah, which filed it.
But the physical damage has already been done as the army’s manhunt for militants continues.
As residents retrieved mattresses, wardrobes and air conditioning units from the camp on Wednesday under the surveillance of Israeli troops, gunshots rang out through the streets.
A loud explosion echoed across the city, followed by a column of dust rising as another building was apparently blown up, sending the smell of gunpowder wafting in the wind.