BEIRUT, July 22 (Reuters) – Like an endangered species, Beirut’s elegant old buildings are staring at extinction.

In a construction frenzy fuelled by a frothy economy and dollops of cash from Gulf Arab and Lebanese investors, new tower blocks are rising helter-skelter across the capital, many of them over the demolished ruins of its architectural heritage.

A few conservationists are trying to save something from the wreckage, but in a city where money is king, it may be too late.

"Beirut has become very ugly," lamented Rima Shehadeh, of the private Heritage Foundation. "It will go on, I know, but it will never have the charm it had before, never."

She is compiling files to secure official protection for a few decaying Ottoman-era mansions in the Zokak al-Blatt quarter, hindered by red tape, corruption and lack of a conservation law.

Some typical Lebanese houses with triple-arched windows, elaborate balconies and red-tiled roofs have survived, now dwarfed by the concrete apartment blocks hemming them in. Any sign of dereliction suggests that they are on death row.

Soaring land prices have etched dollar signs into the eyes of Beirut’s property owners. They have every incentive to sell old houses to developers, who flatten them to build high-rises, unconstrained by zoning regulations or respect for human scale.

"It boils down to money," said Mona Hallak, an architect who works with Lebanon’s oldest conservation association.

The building boom has accelerated in the last couple of years as Lebanon emerged unscathed from the global recession which punished Gulf real estate sectors in Dubai and elsewhere.

Lebanon, still reconstructing after its 1975-90 civil war, might seem a precarious haven for investment.

Only four years ago, the Israeli air force was bombing southern Beirut into rubble during a war with Shi’ite Hezbollah guerrillas. The country flirted with renewed civil war in 2008.

Now enjoying a respite from instability, the economy grew a startling 9 percent in 2009 and may manage 8 percent this year.



HIGH-RISE HEAVEN

Giant new buildings are piercing Beirut’s skyline, none brasher — or to its critics more hateful — than the 50-storey Sama Beirut tower, set to be Lebanon’s tallest at 200 metres.

Amid the dust and din of construction, it is looming over the narrow streets, small houses and gardens that once made up an intimate corner of the Christian district of Ashrafiyeh.

Many of Beirut’s luxury tower blocks stand almost empty, the apartments owned by Gulf Arabs or Lebanese expatriates who only use them a few weeks a year. Ordinary Beirutis are priced out.

"It’s very sad," said Emily Nasrallah, an elderly novelist who has lived in the city for most of her adult life.

"We are losing the neighbourhood, the fabric of the normal, natural life that people have always lived in Beirut."

Some younger Lebanese are waking up to the abrupt changes in the texture of a city that is home to around 1.5 million people.

Take Pascale Ingea, a shy, soft-spoken 33-year-old artist and teacher, who began a Facebook group called Stop Destroying Your Heritage in March in outrage over relentless demolitions in the traditional Ashrafiyeh quarter where she had grown up.

"One day I had enough of being a passive citizen," she explained in her workshop loft in an old building.

Ingea told how she had watched helplessly from her balcony as workers wrecked a splendid 19th-century building she had known since her childhood. "I had dreamed of buying this palace and restoring it and turning it into a fine arts academy."

She collaborates with Naji Raji, 22, who races around Beirut like a self-appointed conservation vigilante, checking venerable buildings for hints of imminent demolition, photographing the evidence and contacting the culture ministry to intervene.

"We are working really hard," he said, describing a struggle to outwit developers who choose odd times like Sunday nights to knock out interiors, swiftly turning old houses into skeletons.



TOMBSTONE BLUES

This month conservation groups launched an awareness campaign that features a picture of tombstones for recently demolished old buildings against a backdrop of dark skyscrapers.

They have won support from Lebanon’s youthful culture minister, Salim Warde, who is determined to halt the havoc.

Any demolition order must now bear his signature. He is also pushing parliament to enact a law that would give tax breaks and other incentives to owners of heritage houses.

"These buildings are part of our national treasures, of our identity, of who we are," Warde told Reuters. "So we’re not destroying wood and stone, but a part of Beirut and a part of the architectural heritage that’s been left to us to preserve."

"We are the only Arab country that has not passed a law to preserve heritage houses," he said. "This is outrageous."

Even if the law passes — an earlier version has languished since 1997 — it may take several years to implement, a time-lag that powerful, well-connected buyers of old houses may exploit.

"I dream of seeing one intact street in Beirut in 20 years. It’s really wishful thinking," said Hallak, the architect.

She has spent 13 years fighting to save a single historic building, used by snipers during the civil war, and now, with French financial support, set to become an interactive museum.

"What else can you do?" she shrugged. "Everything is for sale in this city — history, identity, the soul of the city."

Hallak argues for preserving vibrant old neighbourhoods, not just single buildings of particular architectural merit.

"We need an urban cluster that maintains the soul of the city, with the gardens and houses and the people living in them, the whole ensemble," she said. "Individual houses are museums."

Thirteen years ago her group listed four such neighbourhoods with 520 buildings worth preserving. "We know 70 of these have been destroyed. The rest are on the way," Hallak said.

For architect and urban planner Simone Kosremelli, it is too late to salvage Beirut’s heritage: a few jewels will survive, thanks to their appreciative owners, but the state has long ago missed the chance to buy up old buildings for public use.

"Today this is impossible," she said, citing astronomical land prices beyond the reach of a cash-strapped government.

Kosremelli said Lebanon should "minimise the catastrophe" by at least saving myriad old houses in mountain villages, where land is much cheaper and vernacular architecture could live on. (Editing by Janet Lawrence)

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seems to relish a fight, which may be just as well for a man who has acquired so many enemies at home and abroad.

The hardline leader, already under fire from conservative and reformist foes, has also antagonized bazaar merchants. His populist government is facing economic pain as new foreign sanctions bite on the world’s fifth biggest oil exporter.

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seems to relish a fight, which may be just as well for a man who has acquired so many enemies at home and abroad.

The hardline leader, already under fire from conservative and reformist foes, has also antagonised bazaar merchants. His populist government is facing economic pain as new foreign sanctions bite on the world’s fifth biggest oil producer.

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Ambiguity has long marked ties between the United Arab Emirates and its powerful Gulf neighbor Iran.

One UAE member, Abu Dhabi, has a prolonged territorial dispute with Iran, but this has rarely disrupted the hum of Iranian commerce with another emirate, Dubai.

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Ambiguity has long marked ties between the United Arab Emirates and its powerful Gulf neighbour Iran.

One UAE member, Abu Dhabi, has a prolonged territorial dispute with Iran, but this has rarely disrupted the hum of Iranian commerce with another emirate, Dubai.

DAMASCUS (Reuters) – Church bells mingle with calls to prayer from mosques in the Old City of Damascus, home to Christian communities rooted here long before the Islamic era.

“Many Muslims feel they own the truth. Many Christians do too,” said Mayssa Rumman, who runs a tiny, lovingly restored hotel in Bab Touma, a Christian quarter of the Old City.

BOSRA, Syria (Reuters) – Exploiting the acoustics of a free-standing Roman theater at Bosra in Syria, two French women serenade other tourists with an impromptu operatic medley.

Not to be outdone, a Syrian family perched on stone terraces high above the stage warbles Arabic songs to the beat of a drum.

DAMASCUS (Reuters) – Nahla and her pharmacist husband Malik were prospering in the Shi’ite city of Kerbala, despite the sectarian and criminal violence unleashed by the U.S.-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. They even bought a new house.

Then one day in 2006, Usama, the eldest of their five children, stepped out to buy a sandwich. He never came back.

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Israel can probably live with the diplomatic cost of its bloody storming of Turkish-backed aid ships bound for Gaza — unless its U.S. ally fails to shield it.

Israel’s high-seas interception of the flotilla, in which nine people were killed, has provoked a firestorm of criticism around the world and shredded the Jewish state’s already tattered relationship with Turkey, once its only Muslim ally.

DAMASCUS, May 28 (Reuters) – Syria, a middling Arab country formally at war with Israel over the occupied Golan Heights, must juggle its alliances to survive in a volatile Middle East.

Threats of a new conflict have ricocheted between Syria, Israel, Iran and Lebanon this year, especially after Israeli and U.S. talk of alleged Syrian arms transfers to Lebanese Hezbollah fighters, although leaders on all sides deny they want a fight. Impatient with the United States, but keeping the door ajar, President Bashar al-Assad is clinging to an Iranian-led "resistance" camp, while signalling readiness to resume indirect peace talks with Israel via Turkey, a former foe turned friend.

"We cannot wait any longer," he told Italy’s La Repubblica newspaper this week. "President (Barack) Obama’s America had raised expectations regarding a new Middle East policy. But now the clock of history is striking a new hour."

Syria was now forging a regional order with Russia as well as Turkey and Iran, rather than relying on Western powers.

"This is not a turnabout," said Assad, who has ruled Syria for nearly 10 years. "We want good relations with Washington. Rather it is about recognising reality: the failure by America and Europe in solving the problems of the world, in our region."

Whether any new alignment will have better luck remains to be seen — even Assad acknowledged that the United States would play a decisive role in the final stage of any peace settlement. Syria has emerged from the isolation it endured after the 2005 assassination of Lebanese statesman Rafik al-Hariri. It denied responsibility but was forced to pull its troops out of Lebanon after an outcry led by Washington, Paris and Riyadh.



SLOW GOING

Obama’s "engagement" with Syria has proved frustrating for both sides — Congress has yet to confirm a U.S. ambassador to Damascus named in February after a five-year hiatus. Obama has renewed sanctions on Syria, while easing some in practice.

Some Syrians view the glass as half-full.

"The American school is about to re-open, the ambassador has been named, there have been high-level visits from U.S. officials and a blind eye to some of the sanctions," said Sami Moubayed, a historian. "Relations are nowhere as bad as they were under George W. Bush. Are we in a honeymoon? Not yet."

Reviled as an "evil-doer" by Obama’s predecessor Bush, Syria has calmed some Western concerns about its behaviour in the region, just as the intended U.S. troop pullout from Iraq has assuaged some Syrian fears about Western militarism.

"Their external isolation is reduced," a Western diplomat said. "It’s not that Syria has done nothing. Across the regional issues there has been limited progress in all areas."

Ticking them off, he said Damascus had re-set relations with Lebanon after improving ties with Saudi Arabia. The flow of foreign militants into Iraq had all but ceased as U.S. pullout plans crystallised. Syria clearly wanted a stable, unified Iraq.

Turkish-mediated talks with Israel had made progress until the Gaza war halted them in December 2008. Syria had neither helped nor hindered U.S.-led efforts on the Palestinian track.

"Where concerns remain is weapons transfers to Hezbollah — real concerns about that — and to a lesser extent the relationship with Hamas, although Syria isn’t seen as a primary supplier of weapons in that case," the diplomat said.

For Syria, the end-goal of any U.S. engagement is the return of the Golan Heights, captured by Israel in 1967, Moubayed said.

"A credible, sustainable deal needs the United States. So far Obama has been helpless at moving that track forward. You need to jump-start talks on the Golan," he declared.

Prospects for renewing indirect talks via Turkey seem dim after Turkish criticism of Israeli policy in recent months.

"The Turks and Syrians are ready, but the Israelis aren’t. They say the Turks are no longer impartial," Moubayed said.

Instead, Syria and Israel have been talking more of war than peace, although for now neither seems to want a confrontation.



INFLUENCE IN LEBANON

In Lebanon, arena of a 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah war, Syria’s allies have effective veto power in the government. Hariri’s son Saad has visited Damascus twice as Lebanese prime minister.

That alone indicates how much influence Syria has regained in the neighbour it dominated during its 29-year troop presence.

"In Lebanon, Syria has never been this close to having a full house," said Peter Harling, the International Crisis Group’s Syria analyst, citing a spectrum of relationships.

Apart from its warm ties with Shi’ites through Hezbollah, Syria can manage Lebanon’s Sunni community via Hariri and the Saudis, and has won over key Christian leaders, as well as Druze chieftain Walid Jumblatt, once its bitterest critic.

Syria has made such gains without heeding U.S-Israeli pressure to ditch its alliances with Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas.

Assad mingles with Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah as easily as he does with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and the Emir of Qatar.

"Syria is trying to keep one foot in the resistance camp and one in this more pragmatic camp in the middle," Harling said.

"Its strength lies in its ability to juggle relationships and the ambiguity and ambivalence of its foreign policy."

(Editing by Samia Nakhoul)