Inside the $300,000 maintenance of Syria’s iconic Umayyad Mosque

Inside the $300,000 maintenance of Syria’s iconic Umayyad Mosque

Just a few days after the liberation of Syria, leading to the end of the Assad rule, in December last year, humanitarian worker Saadettin Muvakit fell upon a sorry sight: the neglected state of the symbolic heritage site of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. "Its condition was catastrophic, from the bathrooms to the foul smell of the carpets. The situation was bad,” Saadettin told The New Arab. Originally from Aleppo, Saadettin is the CEO of HAND (…