Published: March 2014  Syria: The Chaos of War  Picture of a
view of Damascus from the hills overlooking the city   Will the
walls fall?  By Anne Barnard Photograph by Andrea Bruce  In the
rectangular courtyard of the Umayyad Mosque, the heart of Old
Damascus, women swathed in black sit and chat on the cream-
colored stone floor, polished smooth by the comings and goings
of generations. The sky overhead is an identical rectangle of
blue. Children chase one another into shady corners, as pigeons
swoop in and out, drawn, the women in black like to say, to the
holiness of the place.  Within the mosque’s sturdy Roman walls,
this quintessentially Damascene mix of ancient grandeur,
restfulness, and quotidian bustle continues undisturbed for now,
despite the rumbles of shelling in the distance—dispatches from
the civil war that is ravaging the city’s ramshackle outskirts.
But step out through the mosque’s towering gate, and it becomes
clear that the Old City of Damascus, though mostly undamaged
physically, has change