Travel in Syria can be fraught with danger. In contested areas, shelling and the potential to get caught up in skirmishes between government and opposition forces pose an ominous threat, while checkpoints are often a more frequent problem for conscription-age men dodging military service or families with known or perceived political and sectarian allegiances.
While Lebanon is witnessing an influx of Syrian refugees into the country — a flow unlikely to abate anytime soon — for Amr and other drivers traveling back and forth across the landscape of Syria’s civil conflict provides the opportunity to make a decent living. Amr says he makes between $300 to $400 a month. Regardless of US military intervention, he will continue making the round trip from Aleppo to Beirut and back.
“I make a good living, I can provide for my family,” says Amr. “I don’t know how to do anything else, and there are no jobs in Syria.”
“I fear more for my family in Aleppo than I do for myself on the road.”
via Syria’s Bus Drivers Brave War to Provide Transport
Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East.
Some are on one side, some in the other,… but both work in the same lines, same roads, same stations, same conditions, and they rest in the same places sharing tea and conversation.
That’s the lesson to learn from Syrian bus drivers.
As it’s said in the article:
“A lot of people are neither with the regime nor the opposition. They are stuck between both.
And these brave men who keep worrying for their families staying back home, will be their only way out thru opposite warlines and multiple checkpoints, getting out to that safer kind of hell that is called exile.
Now they will be able to hope making it back some day.
At least from me and in the name of some friends I know… shokran guys.
RESPECT.
Al-Must'arib (the vocational Mossarab) 