At the Sham supermarket on Donegall Road, south Belfast, managers Sultan and Mohammed have decided it's time to leave.
"It's about to kick off," says Mohammed, who left Syria in 2014 with a shrapnel wound in his leg and became a British citizen in 2015.
"We've got to go," says his younger friend Sultan, who was just 10 years old when he and his family fled Aleppo to come to Northern Ireland’s capital.
The two men get into Mohammed's car, which is a living monument to what life with six children is like: croissants lie half-hidden under seats, discarded clothes climb up the baby seat, and one of the windows appears to be permanently open.
At a Lebanese cafe a few minutes around the corner, the two Syrians, both of whom have lived in Northern Ireland for more than a decade, talk about the destruction of all their hard work.
Their supermarket, which Mohammed has managed in this staunchly loyalist Protestant area of south Belfast since 2021, has been destroyed for the second time in two years by gangs of masked men targeting minority ethnic people and their businesses.
On Monday, the shelves were full, the area out front was lined with fruit and vegetables, and the aisles were gleaming.
Now the market is burnt out, its front - and part of the block of flats above it - blackened.
The shutters that were supposed to protect it have split in two. A large wheelie bin sits outside. Pigeons work busily in the rubble, picking out bits of food.
Both Mohammed and Sultan knew that Monday's knife attack by 30-year-old Sudanese man Hadi Alodid on Stephen Ogilvie could be the trigger for a third summer of racist violence in Belfast.
"We saw some things on Facebook, so we knew it was going to happen," Mohammed said. On Tuesday, "out of respect" for Ogilvie, he closed the market.
It made no difference. At 7pm, as gangs were beginning to rampage through parts of loyalist Belfast, throwing petrol bombs through the windows of homes they believed belonged to minority ethnic families and torching cars, Mohammed's phone started to light up with messages.
The next morning, Mohammed and Sultan arrived to witness the destruction. The fridges and freezers - all new after the previous attack on the market in August 2024, after riots in the English town of Southport spread across the UK - were gone.
"The attack took all the produce," Mohammed told Middle East Eye.
Across the road from the Sham supermarket is Sandy Row Rangers Supporters Club. Dedicated to Glasgow's Protestant football club, it’s an establishment that fits into its surroundings.
Sandy Row and the area of south Belfast around it are a loyalist heartland wedded to the continued existence of Northern Ireland as part of the British state.
On one wall, pictures of the late Queen Elizabeth II celebrate her Diamond Jubilee in 2012, with the title "From Sandy Row to the House of Windsor".
Below this homage to Elizabeth is a mural paying tribute to Northern Ireland’s football team, with the inscription "Our wee country".
Other murals along Sandy Row honour the memory of loyalist paramilitary fighters who died during the Troubles, with the crests and insignia of the Ulster Defence Association and Ulster Freedom Fighters - once dubbed "the thugs in hoods" - daubed on red-brick walls.
Flags hang from buildings and railings: the Union Jack, the Saint George's Cross and the Israeli flag, which flies in opposition to the Palestinian, and occasional Hezbollah, flags seen in Catholic west Belfast.
