A girl poses in front of the statue of Aalah-al-din, an Islamic hero, in Damascus, capital of Syria, Nov. 2, 2011. Syria's tourism, which has become an important source of hard currency in the last few years, plunged sharply due to months' of unrest and EU sanctions. The Tourism Ministry's statistics show that 8.545 million tourists visited Syria in 2010, including 440,311 European tourists. [Xinhua/Yin Bogu]