Just 15 kilometers from the center of Damascus, Douma was in 2011, before the Syrian war began, a prosperous peripheral city where its 150,000 inhabitants felt confident, despite their traditional religiosity, in the face of the secularism and modernity of the capital. . Now only a third of them remain there. The signs of destruction in the central mosque square, where opposition groups gathered to organize the fight against the regime, now bear witness to the fate of the main Damascus insurgent enclave. Its civilian population suffered a five-year siege of famine, some of the worst chemical attacks of the conflict, and brutal repression that emptied its homes and razed its streets, turning the city into a ghetto of suffering.
“My family will never forgive, they demand punishment for the leaders of the regime,” says Samir al Ammy, 53, with hatred in his eyes, despite his apparent friendliness. “Syria will not forget the crimes of Bashar al-Assad.” His blacksmith workshop, on Douma’s main shopping street, sits on the site of his family clan’s building that was demolished by army missiles on February 22, 2018. He lost 17 members of his extended family, including They, one of their children, 20 years old.
“The last 13 years have been hell for us (…) we have lost a large part of our family, our homes, our businesses,” he recalls while showing the rusty remains of a rocket in what was the basement. Death, destruction and ruin is the legacy that Bashar Assad leaves in Douma. “Until recently, I had to hide another of my sons, 20 years old, to prevent him from being mobilized and sent to the Aleppo front (in the north of the country),” he confesses with the fear that has plagued thousands of parents. Syrians in the final stage of the regime.
Reconstruction is now the main concern of its inhabitants. Engineer Issa Muktaal, 62, acts as head of the Douma Municipal Administration. From the mayor’s office he directs the city’s public services as provisional councilor. “Some 8,000 people have already returned to the city after the fall of Assad, but we do not have the capacity to accommodate them,” he laments.
Next to him sits one of the first returnees, Rachid Tammar, 40, who describes himself as a “businessman.” He has returned to his city from Idlib, in northern Syria, where he was expelled by the regime in 2018 after the surrender of the opposition in Douma. His return has now been triumphant, shortly after the Islamist brigades of Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) took over the Syrian capital. “I have come as a volunteer to advise the new municipal managers,” he explains, impeccably dressed in the midst of the misery of Douma. Before saying goodbye, he repeats the usual slogans of the authorities of the new Syria: “There will be no personal vendettas, we must turn the page and look to the future, but those responsible for war crimes will be arrested and tried.”
The rebel militia Jaish al Islam resisted the siege of the Eastern Ghouta region, which includes Douma, for five years. They handed over their weapons to the army and left the capital enclave in the direction of the strongholds that the opposition had in the north of the country. Some 10,000 insurgent fighters and their accompanying civilians were then evacuated to the northern provinces of Idlib and Aleppo. The shortage of food and medicine had caused cases of death due to starvation and lack of health care. Some 100,000 civilians remained blocked in the region.
Merchant Samir Aredin, 32, still lives on the same street in Douma where 43 civilians died in a regime chemical weapons attack in 2018. Among them were his wife and two children. He suffered serious poisoning from chlorine gas, like hundreds of other neighbors, which left him with serious consequences. He still seems dazed by the toxic content of the gas cylinders dropped from a helicopter over the building where he lived. “I will not rest until the culprits are convicted,” he says with determination, “on this street there were no opposition militia posts, only normal people.” “No one who has committed a crime as horrible as this could obtain forgiveness, no one,” he warns. “The attack was launched to force the surrender of the opposition forces, who were willing to fight,” he claims. His accusation was endorsed in 2020 by United Nations investigators.
Another chemical attack attributed to government forces caused hundreds of deaths (more than a thousand, according to the opposition) in 2013, in Eastern Ghouta. The international community then forced the regime to hand over its chemical arsenal for supervised destruction, although the United Nations suspects that the regime kept at least 1% of the lethal and toxic products it stored. Investigators from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons confirmed the chlorine gas attack committed on the streets of Douma in 2018 and attributed it to the Tiger brigades, the regime’s elite forces. The use of this lethal weaponry is prohibited by the Chemical Weapons Convention, which was ratified by Syria in 2013. The United States has just confirmed that it is working, through allies on the ground in Syria, to destroy chemical weapons sites. that still remain in the Arab country after the elimination of 1,300 tons of toxic products completed by the international community in 2014.
