I was recently buying lunch in Damascus when two Iraqi immigrants entered the shop. It was an elderly mother and her daughter. The daughter asked a small boy working in the shop to find a chair for her mother. The heat outside was suffocating.
‘There’s so many of us in Syria’, the mother addressed the shop owner with a smile on face. ‘You must be tired of Iraqis by now’.
‘Of course, not’, the shopkeeper replied. ‘Syria is fatih’, he replied. He used the Arabic word for ‘open’.
