NEW YORK TIMES: …In this war of murky battlefield reports, it is hard to know whether the rebels’ recent forays past some of the capital’s circle of defenses — in an operation that they have, perhaps immodestly, named the “Battle of Armageddon” — will lead to more lasting gains than earlier offensives did. But travels along the city’s battlefronts in recent days made clear that new lines, psychological as much as geographical, had been crossed…
For months, this ancient city has been hunched in a defensive crouch as fighting raged in suburbs that curve around the city’s south and east. On the western edge of the city, the palace of the embattled president, Bashar al-Assad, sits on a steep, well-defended ridge.
In between, Damascus, with its walled Old City, grand diagonal avenues and crowded working-class districts, has remained the eye of the storm. People keep going to work, even as electric service grows sporadic and groceries dwindle, even as the road to the airport is often cut off by fighting outside the city, and even as smoke from artillery and airstrikes in suburbs becomes a regular feature on the horizon… (more)
“Battle of Armageddon”? Definitely a stretch, but not that far-fetched.
Megiddo is the site of an ancient city in northern Israel. “Armageddon” is Greek for the Hebrew “Har Megiddo”, or “hill of Megiddo”, which is a small part of a much larger range of hills that extends to the north well into Lebanon and Syria.
Megiddo is only a bit more than 90 miles as the crow flies from Damascus, so their wishful thinking isn’t all that far misplaced.