The three-star general’s sunglasses reflected the midday heat, the crowd appropriately – or obediently – roared their support. There was even a civilian with a beard who opened the back of a van and distributed Syrian flags to passing schoolchildren. Then came a tremendous blast of outgoing artillery fire.

There were others who merely listened; the general’s giant conscript bodyguard, Tamer – steel helmet covered in camouflage, Kalashnikov cradled in his arms – was watching the length of the street and the surrounding alleyways, and glancing towards the rooftops. In ordinary life, he is a shepherd from Deir ez-Zour, but now he was watching a different kind of flock.

The general was quite frank about it. “Who knows if the terrorists did not leave people behind here when they left?” he pondered later. “There could be spies. If we continued down this road, you could be taken hostage. Your life depends on just one phone call out of here. Who knows what is in the hearts of the people?”

Grim words, but the 45-year-old general has a tough job. As field commander of Daraya – a place of constant battle and at least one massacre 18 months ago – he is, like other Syrian generals around Damascus, trying to talk his soldiers’ way back into the rebel-held suburbs, meeting “reconciliation committees” of doctors, shop-owners, religious sheikhs who live under the rule of Jabhat al-Nusra and other Islamist groups. “Syrian fighters who surrender their weapons will be given a clean record,” he told me. “The foreigners who are here must go, or their grave will be in Syria.”

It’s a hard sell, but it clearly worked just down the road in Lawan more than a year ago. The rebels have left and the shops are open and this little bit of Damascus was quiet. The soldiers were offered falafel – ground and fried chickpeas – by a local vendor. But then, he would do that, wouldn’t he? Who knows whom he gave his falafel to a couple of years ago when the rebels were here? The general watched all this with proprietary interest. This is, after all, his territory.

read more here;   http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/there-is-no-sectarianism-in-the-army-syrias-war–the-generals-view-9206169.html