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Mohammed al-Abad, a wiry young man wearing black jeans and wraparound shades, drives his motorcycle several times a week up a gravel hill amassed from the crushed remains of his old neighborhood in a city just outside Damascus, the Syrian capital.
At the top, he surveys a Martian landscape of flattened, dun-colored sand. There is little indication that this was once a thriving community of traditional one-story houses built around courtyards and small garden plots.
In the distance, Mr. Abad, 29, can see the apartment towers of Mezzeh, a relatively affluent, mostly residential district of Damascus, which survived the 14-year civil war largely intact. It might as well be Oz.
“Nothing happened there, and here it is wrecked,” Mr. Abad said on a recent summer afternoon, his tone hardening. “There you can see there was no bombing, no gunfire, nothing. It is all actors, artists, people with money, regime supporters. Nothing bad happened to them, they did not touch them, but they destroyed our lives. It makes me so angry.”
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