A cold sun sets behind the empty husk of a mosque. Its central prayer hall was blown out in an explosion. A group of children play football among the rubble in front, kicking up dust into an air already thick with it.
Anas Abu Ahmed drives us to a mass grave, not far from the bombed mosque. It is a barren and desolate site, with only a scattering of dark stones marking its edges. “My cousin is here somewhere,” he says gesturing across the wasteland, “so is her mother, and her daughter.” Three generations in a single grave, alongside the remains of hundreds of others.
“I have other relatives in another grave over there, but let’s not go visit it right now.”
These two nondescript burial sites are the sole testament to the Darayya massacre. Until the fall of the regime in recent days, the Darayya massacre didn’t exist, at least not in Syria, where the regime publicly denied it.
Yet it did happen. In 2012, Bashar al-Assad deployed 14,000 men into the Damascus suburb. The Free Syrian Army, then still in its infancy and unable to withstand Assad’s tanks and helicopters, was forced to withdraw. In its stead the army advanced, followed closely by the notoriously brutal Shabiha militia. Over five days, they carried out a slaughter.
“At night, the regime would enter our apartments, searching for so-called ‘terrorists’—but they weren’t just targeting fighters, they went for the women and children as well,” recounts Anas. “The people of Darayya saw a lot of death in those days. The dead littered the streets and would quickly begin to rot.”
How had the revolution come to this, wondered Anas. They had been swept up in the Arab Spring, inspired by the calls for freedom reverberating across the Middle East. He was there at the start of it all, from the first gathering outside Darayya’s Al-Abbas mosque after Friday prayers.
“My friend called me up and told me to come so I thought, why not?” he reminisces. “At the start of all this we didn’t even want the end of the regime. In fact we had been told not to call for [Assad’s] overthrow, out of fear that the regime would retaliate against us.”
However, it didn’t take long for the government to turn to violence. At the second gathering, three protesters were shot dead, only fuelling the flames of dissent, as tens of thousands turned out to their funeral procession.
Muhammed was also there in those days. An early leader in the movement, he was part of a tight-knit group tasked with selecting the location of the next protest and getting the word out through informal networks.
They developed a system of codewords to spread the plan. Muhammed was in a cell of 20, who would each call five friends and make a strange request. “Shall we go and buy blue shoes together on the corner of Abbasiya and Farhas street?” Each knew what that really meant. And each was then responsible for calling five others, and so on.
“We were a peaceful movement; we never wanted our quest for freedom to turn to violence,” says Mohammed. But unable to stop the protests, the regime kept escalating. First with bullets, then with tanks and shelling.
Assad’s intelligence services rapidly descended on Darayya to suppress the resistance. Muhammed was arrested in 2011, early on Syria’s 13-year-long road to revolution.
“I was stopped outside my home by a group of men, who asked to check my ID. They saw my name and shoved me into a van. I would not see my home again for nine years.”
He was passed through many of Assad’s prisons before finally ending up in Sednaya’s “Red Section”—the worst hole in the regime’s network of nightmares. For years, he endured torment, starvation and torture.
“We wished for death in Sednaya. At points I thought I was already dead. Every Thursday and Sunday the guards would come and execute three of us at random. People used to volunteer themselves, unable to take the misery any longer.”
While Muhammed suffered in Sednaya, forgotten by the world and lost to his own people, his home was being torn apart.
Following the massacre, the armed opposition renewed their campaign with a vengeance, managing to liberate Darayya the same year. However, Assad would not let them be free. He enacted a total siege on the neighbourhood for four years, cutting its communications lines in order to isolate it from the world. He blocked food, water and medicine from entering. People tried to farm and hunt rabbits amid the rubble. They built satellite dishes out of dustbin lids and wires. They improvised weaponry, inventing DIY artillery.
“There was no fuel in Darayya at this time, so we would burn plastic to try to make fuel. Red plastics for diesel; green for petrol—I don’t know why it was that way,” one man told me.
When it was clear to Assad that he couldn’t starve Darayya into submission, he intensified his attacks, establishing artillery positions on the hills surrounding the neighbourhood. Families lived in the basements of their bombed-out homes.
For others, this period is too difficult to discuss. “It was a dark time,” mumbles Hamed. “I don’t have the words to explain my feelings about that time. I just remember that the barrel bombs were the worst thing.”
Darayya, a suburb, became known in Syria as the “capital of barrel bombs”. Day and night, helicopters would hover overhead, unloading large barrels packed with explosives. They would fall for around 20 seconds, just enough time for those underneath to realise what was about to happen, before a huge explosion ripped apart concrete and flesh. These bombs were designed not to differentiate between civilian and fighter.
Civilians were actively targeted as the heart of the uprising. Jamal remembers with fear the omnipresent snipers in Assad’s siege. “We used to have to run from building to building, due to the snipers who were always waiting. We learnt to knock down the walls between buildings and move between the neighbourhood like rats.”
The siege ended in 2016, when a deal was brokered between the government and the rebels. Hundreds gathered among the rubble in the early August morning. Fighters, their families and many civilians feared a repeat of the 2012 massacre. They had agreed to surrender the neighbourhood in return for safe passage to Idlib, in Syria’s north.
Anas was among them. He remembers leaving the bombed-out neighbourhood that was his home—glad to be offered the chance to live, mournful that the revolution had failed.
After the end of the battle, Darayya became a closed-off husk of devastation. Only in 2019 were its residents allowed to return. Many did, living in the rubble of their dead revolution. Mohammed was released from Sednaya in 2019. He returned to Darayya a changed man. His weight had reduced from 80kg to 29kg. In the middle of the destruction, he began to rebuild his life. He started a school, whose courtyard is now lined with the smiling graduation photos of some of Syria’s highest-scoring students.
Returning was equally difficult for those who fought on Assad’s side. Samer, who fought for the regime on the Deir ez-Zor front, only found out his home was destroyed when he came back in 2019. “I was shocked, I was ashamed, I shamed my family,” he says. “I fought for them, I gave an arm for that monster and he did this to me. They are gone now, thank God, and now we have to rebuild.”
This rebuilding work has begun, but there is no state yet, and the international community has not stepped in to help. “The world needs to help us—we rose for our freedom expecting the world to rise with us, but they never came. Now is their chance to right this wrong,” says Jamal, standing where his home used to be. He returned home three days ago from Lebanon for the first time in a decade.
“We demand a free, democratic state,” he bellows. “This is what we fought for from the beginning, now we have returned home to claim our right.”
That circle of the Syrian revolution is now complete. Anas spent eight years in a refugee camp in Idlib. He was there on the first day of the revolution and, like Jamal, he returned to his liberated home only three days ago. After 13 long years he was finally back. Now, a new circle is beginning to be drawn in Free Syria.
Additional reporting by Labib Sanidiki
