Damascus under siege? Certainly. But at war? I’m not so sure. The shells swish high over the city, from Mount Qasioun to Deraya, soaring far over the 18th-century Azem Palace and the mosque built on air, the glorious Umayyad with its fragile 8th-century mosaics, last resting place of Saladin, the head of Imam Hussain and John the Baptist. The place vibrates with explosions. Yet down at my favourite hostelry near the Barada river yesterday morning, the latte and the chocolate croissants were as fresh as they were eight months ago, the front page of the government newspaper Thawra bearing a poorly coloured photograph of a regime soldier amid heaps of anonymous rubble. But haven’t I seen this picture before?

Rumours of war. A cliché? Of course. Yet true. On Wednesday, I’m told by trusted friends that the Iranian-style shrine of Sayyida Zeinab has been destroyed by Salafist mortar fire. The tomb of the Prophet’s grand-daughter stands – or stood – on a site from the fourth caliphate. So yesterday, I drive at 140km/h south from Damascus, thundering down fearful motorways amid equally terrified drivers and along country laneways and earthen front-line barricades until suddenly, towering above me, are the blue-marble minarets and golden dome of the tomb of poor Zeinab, sister of Hussain, the Shia world’s first martyr whose own death began the whole sorry chasm within Islam. Mortars crack and rumble around us but save for a few marble squares, the place stands untouched. There’s a T-72 tank down the road and a clutch of government soldiers outside. But the rumour is untrue.

You can tell the diminishing circle of middle-class hope from the destinations plastered over the city’s buses. Until recently, they were announced on display boards; now they are written in vast inky whorls on cardboard taped to the windscreen. The Jobar bus now terminates at the edge of the rebel suburb. The Samaria station single-decker now finishes its journey just the other side of the Old Market. The great Haj railway terminus hasn’t seen a train in six months.

But who is under siege? The shopkeepers and the middle classes of the Mezze boulevard, “supporters” – a dodgy word these days – of the President, or the people of the little hell of Deraya, those who are left amid the cellars and chewed-through fabric of long-destroyed homes whose antagonists worm their way like centipedes through the walls of living rooms, toilets and hallways? “A whole society eaten away,” a Syrian journalist describes it.

A whole country, you might say. Anniversaries are celebrated with suitable gloom. The foundation of the Baath party; the start of the uprising against the Assad regime; the first major attack on government troops. The latter slightly upsets the Western narrative, of months of peaceful demonstrations brutally assaulted by government forces until the rebels reluctantly seized weapons in the summer of 2011. In fact 25 days after the beginning of the revolution, a convoy of the government army’s 145th Infantry Brigade was attacked on Banias bridge. Up to 12 soldiers were killed, 40 more wounded. But the “other” narrative, that of the Assad government’s desperation for “democracy” in order “to save the homeland”, is also hourly contradicted by the air raids against “foreign terrorists” – and surely the Assad lads and lassies can do better than dish up Israel’s and Washington’s clichés – which are erasing so many towns.

I talk to a former Syrian Special Forces officer. “Don’t you remember the ambush and murder of seven of our finest pilots in Hama province?” he asks contemptuously. “Is it surprising that their comrades want to go and smash the people who did this?” How easily revenge becomes a legitimate motive for war in Syria, in any war I guess. Casually, almost without realising its significance, I bump into this awful phenomenon.

READ MORE HERE: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/robert-fisk-the-war-has-reached-damascus-but-for-now-it-is-not-a-warzone-8569212.html