Part One

“I managed to walk calmly to the highway and, thank God, found a bus quickly to return to Damascus,” Samir writes after having gone to the small shelter on the outskirts of Damascus, where he has been caring for 19 cats and 7 wild animals, for the past several years. (To protect his safety, Samir is not his real name.)

On Thursday October 4, he went, as he does nearly every day, to feed the animals and clean their areas.  After he was there for a few minutes, he could hear renewed fighting on the other side of the highway. “It got very loud and even included fighter jets.” On every trip there he walks through fields overlooked by snipers, hence the need to walk slowly and calmly, to indicate that he belongs in the area and is a civilian going about his normal affairs, so as not…