Mods: I am winging it on the theory this is "news", move if you must.Wander through the streets of Damascus this week, and you will see signs everywhere of the conflict in Lebanon. The bearded, black-turbaned Hassan Nasrallah stares out from every shop window, even in the Christian quarter. Here electric-blue neon crosses wink from the domes of the churches, and processions of crucifix-carrying boy scouts squeeze past gaggles of Christian girls heading out on the town, all low-cut jeans and tight-fitting T-shirts. The video shops are full of DVDs showing "highlights" from the war - exploding Israeli tanks and jubilant Hizbullah fighters - which sell even better than the ubiquitous pirated versions of the latest Hollywood releases, The Devil Wears Prada and The Da Vinci Code: evidence that in the contemporary Middle East you don't have to hate western culture, or even be a Muslim, to relish the bloody nose given to ill-judged Israeli and American attempts at imposing their hegemony in the region by force of invasion and cluster bombs.
Evidence of the conflict in Iraq, Syria's neighbour to the north-east, is at first harder to spot than the ubiquitous images from Lebanon, but on closer examination it is no less pervasive. Lounging in every park and teahouse are unshaven, tired-looking Iraqi refugees, driven from their homes by sectarian mayhem. This summer, as Baghdad spiralled out of control, with more violent deaths in one fortnight than in Israel and Lebanon together in nearly a month of warfare, Syria responded by providing asylum (though not work permits) to all Iraqis who were forced to flee, as well as free education for their children.
Talk to the refugees in Damascus, however, and you soon find that one group predominates: the Iraqi Christians. Although they made up only about 3% of the population of prewar Iraq - 700,000 people - under Saddam they were a prosperous minority, symbolised by the high profile of Tariq Aziz, Saddam's Christian foreign minister. Highly educated and overwhelmingly middle class, the Christians were heavily concentrated in Mosul, Basra and especially Baghdad, which before the war had the largest Christian population of any Middle Eastern town or city.
Now at least half of these Christians - around 350,000 people - have fled Bush's new Iraq and its violence, mass abductions and economic meltdown. Wherever I went in Syria I kept running into them - bank managers and engineers, pharmacists and scientists, garage owners and businessmen - all living with their extended families in one-room flats on what remained of their savings, and assisted by the charity of the different churches.
Guardian
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