#damascus

#damascus

Abu Mohammed still remembers the smell. It usually came at dawn, as the mosques sounded the first call to prayer. By the time he sat down for breakfast, it would fill the air around his home in Tadamon, a working-class district in the south-east of Damascus. The smell was hard to define. Whenever he noticed it, Abu Mohammed felt on edge.

The attack on Saint Elias church in Damascus, the first major IS operation post-Assad, marks a significant escalation in violence and insecurity within Syria.