Rastan
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الرستن / ar-Rastan Rastan |
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| Coordinates | 34 ° 55 ' N , 36 ° 44' E | ||
| Basic data | |||
| Country | Syria | ||
| Homs | |||
| ISO 3166-2 | SY-HI | ||
| District | Rastan District | ||
| height | 430 m | ||
| Residents | 39,834 (2004) | ||
 Roman sarcophagus of Arethusa
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Rastan ( Arabic الرستن, DMG ar-Rastan ) is the third largest city in Homs Governorate .
location
Al-Rastan is located 20 km north of its capital, Homs, and 22 km from Hama . It is located in the center of the populated areas of Syria. Neighboring cities are Talbiseh and al-Ghantoo in the south, al-Zaafaraniya and al-Maschrafa in the southeast, Tumin in the north, Deir al-Fardis in the northwest and the village cluster Kafr Nan and Hula in the west.
history
Rastan includes the site of the Roman era city of Arethusa and still contains some of its ancient ruins. It continued to exist as a relatively small but strategic city throughout the Islamic and Ottoman eras .
Al-Rastan in the Syrian Civil War
Since the beginning of the civil war in 2011, Rastan served as the main opposition stronghold and has since been a place of fierce fighting between the security forces and the rebels of the Free Syrian Army . On August 28, 2016, a video was broadcast on social media showing the body of a woman wedged between the roof and floor of a house in Al-Rastan that had collapsed as a result of attacks by the Syrian Air Force.
On May 3, 2018, after the last rebels moved to Idlib Province, the Russian security forces and the Syrian secret police brought the city back under the control of the Syrian government. In the next three to five months, most of them went back to work. However, the city still remains classified as unsafe by the United Nations ( UN ) due to the civil war with neighboring villages and arbitrary arrests of young people in 2019 .
traffic
Rastan is just south of the bridge that connects Homs and Hama. Al-Rastan is on Expressway 5, which connects Aleppo in the north with Dara'a in the south of the country.
Agriculture
Directly at Rastan is the Rastan dam , which dams the Orontes into a reservoir with a volume of up to 228 million m³. The dam is especially important for agricultural irrigation. Rastan also contains one of Syria's most important marl quarries. The cityscape of Al-Rastan is characterized by its location on the Orontes by water scooping wheels (so-called Norias).
sons and daughters of the town
- Mustafa Tlas (1932–2017), general and politician
- Manaf Tlas (* 1964), former brigadier general in the Syrian army
Individual evidence
- ↑ Map of Rastan . Mapcarta.
- ↑ Woman crushed under house ceiling after Assad airstrikes on al-Rastan . Orient News . August 28, 2016
- ↑ Bar'el, Zvi. Report: Assad's air force pounds population centers in Syria's Rastan . Haaretz . March 4, 2012, Retrieved June 28, 2012
- ^ Britannica, p. 19.