DAMASCUS
Abdul Rahman Idris was woken up by the sounds of screaming and ambulance sirens. A resident of Ein Tarma, an area in the Damascene suburb of Ghouta, the 10-year-old was accustomed to the chaos that the Syrian civil war brought. That night, however, was different. Amid the screams of panic were whispers of an unprecedented horror in the area―a chemical attack.
His eyes widened as he realised that the strike had been near his sister’s house. He rushed there with some family members, but was met with haunting nothingness.
Nearly 12 years later, Idris narrates this story as we drive through the streets of Ein Tarma. As with many hotspots of the war, the road we are on is a stretch of ghostly reminders of the life it once held. The air is dusty, and the brown we are enveloped by is sometimes splashed with the colour of a lone shop or a restaurant among the ruins.
Idris points to the skeleton of a building, indistinguishable to me from the ones on either side of it. “That used to be my house,” he says.
In late August 2013, Bashar al-Assad’s Baathist regime attacked multiple towns in Ghouta with the nerve agent sarin, killing over 1,100 people. The attack was part of the civil war that killed more than 2,30,000 people between 2011 and 2024, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights. The war was brought to an abrupt end after a blitz takeover of the government in December 2024 by rebel forces led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). Assad and his family fled to Moscow, one of the regime’s staunchest allies during the war.
After the attack, photos of the effects of the nerve agent on women and children emerged online, horrifying the local and international community. The regime vehemently denied responsibility but multiple investigations by human rights organisations said otherwise.
Idris explains how the situation was uncharted territory for everyone. At the time of bombing, residents of the area usually took refuge in bunkers, even associating the sound of aircraft with a rapid descent into underground chambers. However, gas is heavier than air and sinks into basements, many of which were used as hospitals.
“At the time, the regime was conducting airstrikes along with the chemical attack,” says Idris. “If people went up to their roofs to breathe clean air, they would face the airstrikes.”
I ask him if he could really understand what was going on, considering how young he was. “Living in that atmosphere makes children grow up,” he replies.
“We had responsibilities. We didn’t live our childhood very well, we didn’t play in the neighbourhood because of the constant bombing.”
Horror stories: Mohaity shows a photo of her daughter following the gas attack as her niece watches on | Anagha Subhash Nair
Idris is 22 now and works in mass media. In Hamouriye, we walk through a cemetery, home to multiple mass graves. Idris says many of the people buried there were killed in the chemical attacks. I notice that many of the headstones said ‘21 August 2013’; the date of the attacks.
He stops near one of the headstones and points to it. “That’s my sister,” he says.
Idris’s losses included his nieces Jana, four, and Hala, three. He explains how they found the children before their mother, and thus buried them in a different spot.
“Hala had a needle sticking out of her neck [when we found her],” he says. “Maybe she was on the verge of death and doctors were trying to save her, but they couldn’t.”
Later that year, under American and Russian pressure, Syria joined the Chemical Weapons Convention and declared its chemical weapon stockpile, which was later destroyed under a joint mission by the UN and Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). But in 2017 and 2018, more rebel-held areas were gassed, sparking strong suspicion that Syria still possessed significant undeclared chemical weapons and capabilities. These claims, however, were difficult to investigate because of the ongoing fighting and the lack of access during Assad’s rule.
The chemical attacks in the suburbs of Damascus are seared into the memories of those there. Marwan Othman Abuqr, 55, and his wife, Ruwaida Mohaity, 49, are among them. I meet the couple in a workshop they own. They are eager to share their story, and Mohaity pulls out her phone to show me photos of her children, Israa, 11, and Hasan, five, whom they lost to the attacks in Ghouta.
Abuqr was one of 17 people working at a relief centre when the attack happened. He covered his nose and tried to flee, but lost consciousness. When he opened his eyes, he was in a clinic, surrounded by ailing women and children, many of them foaming at the mouth.
“My wife’s aunt told me that she saw me at 3am, foaming at the mouth and bleeding from the nose. Death seemed certain,” he says.
Mohaity explains how she had no clue about what was going on, and all that she felt was a sense of strangulation. Her last memory was of her daughter asking to go to the wash room. “I couldn’t even get up to take her to the toilet,” she says.
“I was paralysed in a wheelchair for about 40 days after regaining consciousness.”
A Lancet study from 2015 shows the higher probability of adverse birth outcomes in pregnant women and their children following exposure to such gases. Mohaity tells me she was pregnant at the time of the attack, and that she miscarried six months into her term, possibly an effect of the poisonous nerve agent.
Abuqr says that he, too, experienced the effects of the gas for some time following the attack. “Our minds were affected, we couldn’t concentrate,” he explains.
“It was like that for a while, and then God gave us back our health.”
Not far from the workshop, I meet a man building a wall. He appears to be in his 70s. People around him explain that he was a survivor of the gas attack, and that the building he is helping reconstruct was destroyed during the war. He rolls up his sleeve, showing me an injury on his forearm from explosives.
Syria’s new administration has promised to destroy any remaining traces of chemical weapons and capabilities. In early March, Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shibani addressed an OPCW meeting at The Hague, promising full compliance and transparency pertaining to ongoing investigations. In late March, President Ahmed al-Sharaa announced a caretaker government, with limited inclusion of those from the country’s minorities.
For survivors like Idris, justice means holding those who authorised these war crimes to account. “Especially the higher-ups,” he says. “Maybe the supporters [of the regime] were servants of their employers, but the higher-ups were responsible for the massacres.”
Another survivor I met, Khaled Mohammed Hazoume, tells me about the collective fatigue among the survivors from talking to the media. He says that reliving the trauma feels pointless when the one thing they want―for Assad to be held accountable―still appears to be distant.
Those who lived the years of war are trying to pick up their lives once more. Time heals, but some scars take longer than others to heal. “I had only one sister, and she was so kind to me, especially because I was the youngest in my family,” says Idris.
He chokes up, unable to complete his thought. “We really felt her loss. I was the only sibling for quite a while....”
His mind wanders, eyes moist with sorrow and fond remembrance.