سائق الحافلة السوري: هل هي أخطر مهنة في العالم؟

Syrian bus driver: the most dangerous job in the world?
By Ruth Sherlock, Beirut
7:22AM GMT 03 Feb 2015
The windscreen of Mohammed’s coach is so cracked from shell-blasts it is only held together with sticky tape. Bullet-holes pierce the side. Fans and reading lights above the passenger seats have been ripped out to prevent weapons being hidden in the vents behind them.
Mohammed, a slender man in his mid forties with a nervous twitch, doesn’t give his surname. That is because he is a bus driver. A bus driver, that is, in Syria, driving what may now be the most dangerous route in the world.
One of Syria’s small miracles is that even in the throes of civil war, the public transport has not entirely stopped. Journeys may cross front lines, accelerate through armed clashes and run the gauntlet of kidnap by pro-Assad gunmen and jihadists alike, but it is still possible to buy a ticket to Aleppo or Raqqa.
“A lot of times my bus was shot at,” said Mohammed. “I have driven through live clashes, fired on both by armed groups and the regime.”
Every few days Mohammed drives from Beirut in Lebanon to Aleppo in northern Syria, a journey traversing much of the devastated country’s most contested territory. The western half of the city is in regime hands, the east occupied by the rebels, and around them both are concentric circles of regime, rebel and jihadi-controlled territory.
Much of the city is all but smashed to bits. But people still want to go to visit family, or what is left of their property.
Mohammed has a thick scar above his left eye - a shrapnel wound incurred during one of his journeys.
“I was on the highway and suddenly, we were in a full battle,” he said. “I opened the driver’s door and started running, but a shell exploded nearby. The shrapnel cut my face and broke my arm.”
Mohammed’s journeys have improved recently, after the regime began allowing public transport buses on to a military road that travels through Latakia province, its stronghold south-west of Aleppo. The new route has allowed it to cut out a number of front lines.
But the buses are still the prey of militias, who line their pockets with money taken from the driver and passengers.
Close to the stand where Mohammed's coach was parked in Beirut, Abed sat behind the wheel of another battered vehicle.
Bags sagged under Abed's eyes, and much of his face was covered in a thick but patchy beard, grown not voluntarily but because it could make the difference between life and death.
"I have to grow this beard,” he said. “If I don't have it then at best the jihadists won’t let me enter their area.”
Abed’s run is from Beirut in Lebanon to Raqqa in north-east Syria, the de facto capital of the “Caliphate” controlled by the jihadists of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
"It's a very hard situation," he said as he sat behind the wheel of his battered vehicle. "Every time you leave your house you wonder if you will ever return.
"We have to cross Syria: first in the territory of the regime, and then through that under Isil.”
On his journeys to Raqqa, he stops the bus at the last checkpoint in regime-held territory to give his female passengers time to put on or adjust their black cloth niqabs and abayas, the veils that cover their face and bodies that are mandatory dress for women in Isil areas.
On the run from Raqqa to Beirut, most of his passengers are either families with children, or the elderly, escaping the war. Isil does not allow men out of the city lest they should be leaving to go and fight with the regime.
"If you are in Raqqa, male and born after 1985, I cannot sell you a ticket,” he said. "Women have to have a male escort and a clear and strong reason to be allowed to leave.”
On the long drive south-west through rural and lawless terrain, buses are often ambushed by armed groups, sometimes from the rebels, or sometimes from the regime.
"The danger is from both sides,” Abed said. “If the Syrian army stops the bus and finds someone who they think is suspicious then they take him away. The armed groups on the other side do the same."
Abed’s last attack was less than three months ago, when militiamen blocked the road and forced all the passengers from the coach.
"They demanded everyone's mobile phones,” he said. “When one person put up resistance they shot directly around their feet to scare them. Other times they have just killed people on the spot.”
Abed and Mohammed said they had both lost colleagues in the war. Some of the bus drivers had embarked on a journey and simply disappeared. The men presumed they had been kidnapped.
Others had died, one when his bus was hit by a shell, another shot in the head by a sniper.
For all the dangers, in Syria's depressed economy, Mohammed and Abed both said they could not afford to stop doing their jobs.
"If I stopped doing this," said Abed, "how would I feed my family? It's dangerous but it's my only choice."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/11382839/Syrian-bus-driver-the-most-dangerous-job-in-the-world.html