Tourism in war-torn Syria ?

This article reads like a novel.  Gives one a feeling of being there in those deserted towns and sympathizing with the  hopelessness felt by  innocent, ordinary people caught in the throes of  an unnecessary war.

John Pedro Schwartz writing at ForeignPolicy:
 ....At night Dave and I pick our way  through Bab Touma, a Christian borough of the Old City now dotted with sandbags and soldiers, to a lounge bar opened five months ago by two Frenchmen. "They got a good price on the place and expected business to rebound," Dave explains. But first we must shoot the breeze with the young men gathered five-strong on a bench outside the entrance to his old neighborhood. "I know everybody here," Dave says. Next, "We have to stop in this hammam and say hello."

In the antechamber to the baths, we take tea with the manager, his assistant, his friend, a customer, his son. Then, back out on the alleyway, encountering two soldiers seated in a vaulted cove, Dave approaches them and begins talking to one of the soldiers. I shake hands with the other soldier, whose grip is like a vise and whose face is half in the dark. I tell him we're headed to a bar. He tells me he doesn't drink. After a pause, the Kalashnikov cradled in his arms perfectly still, he asks, 
"Quayyes?" Cool? "Super quayyes," I assure him.

We're at the empty lounge bar now, and the bartender's drawing a mug of Amstel and describing the gauntlet of checkpoints -- both army and rebel -- she must pass through to get to her home in Homs. "I tried to go to Baba Amr once, and I had to stop at checkpoints where the rebels were, and they didn't want to let me in. They were like, ‘What do you want here?' and I was like, ‘I want to see the ruins!'" A district in Homs, Baba Amr was the site of a major attack in February by Syrian government forces to regain control over the city. Ten days of operations resulted in the deaths of about 700 people in the city, according to the Local Coordination Committees, anti-Assad groups that have planned and monitored events on the ground within their own communities since the start of the uprising.

The bartender works a second job teaching business English to cover the $250 monthly rent on her apartment here in Bab Touma, named after St. Thomas, a one-time resident. She tells us that the Christians in the neighborhood are arming themselves. Indeed, bearing out the Christians' worst fears, a bomb exploded this past Sunday outside a police station in Bab Touma, killing 10 people and wounding 15 others. War has struck at the "Gate of St. Thomas."

The DJ, spinning electro in the lavender light, mentions that we have only one life to live. Dave raises his chin from the empty vodka shot: "Two! I'm Muslim." "One! I believe in logic," the bartender rejoins, pushing aside a dyed-red bang...........