Baladi News – (Alaa Noureddine)
The flames continue devouring more and more of shops and markets in the old city of Damascus. Assad’s media attributed such “selective” fires to unknown reasons without going into detail, whereas residents clarified that such fires would not stop at this point soon.
The most recent of the fires that blaze only in Old Damascus took place in a building facing Umayyad Mosque, as reported by “Damascus Now” Assad’s intelligence network in Facebook. The network did not clarify the nature of the building or examine the reasons of the fire. Moreover, it did not seek any statement by the civil defense staff that rushed to extinguish the fire.
On the 5th of this month, similar news about fires in houses and shops in Saruja and al-Fahhama in the middle of Damascus were reported by the network, and the reasons were also unknown. Later, it turned out through subscribers’ comments that the fires took place in the absence of the owners of the burned assets and continued for four hours without the interference of firefighters.
Commenters wondered about the real reasons of such repeated fires that “take place exclusively in this area”, whereas others thanked god that the name of Umayyad Mosque has not been changed yet, in reference to the Iranian historical ambitions to capture such an important religious symbol.
Local sources pointed out that the repeated fires in specific areas threaten that the Iranian demographic change would be accelerated, indicating that those who refuse to sell their properties to Iranian brokers are at the risk of losing them in such fires.
It is noteworthy that this is the 6th fire to have taken place in “Old Damascus”. The most violent one happened in al-Asroniyya market and destroyed 40 shops, but Assad’s regime made no investigations on the real reasons of the incidents and provided no compensations for the affected people.