Picking our way around the ruins of the Damascus suburb of Douma, it took a little while to realize what was missing.
There were women carrying groceries, old men droning by on motorbikes and skinny children heaving jugs of water home.
But there were few young men.
They had died in the war, been thrown in prison or scattered far beyond Syria’s borders. Now, it had fallen to survivors like Um Khalil, a 59-year-old, round-faced grandmother, to reckon with their absence.
Three of her sons had been killed. Another had been tortured in a rebel prison, and a fifth had disappeared into government detention. Her daughters-in-law had to start working, while she was raising five grandchildren without her husband. He had died in an airstrike.
“Sometimes I sit and think, how did this happen?” Um Khalil said in the apartment where her remaining family was squatting. “I had sons working. Everything was normal, and suddenly I lost them. I had a husband. I lost him, too. I have no answers. God forgive whoever was behind this.”
Then she burst out: “Forgive them, don’t forgive them, what difference does it make? I wish I could find whoever destroyed this city. I would kill him.”
The souk, or bazaar, in the Old City of Damascus, Syria, June 24, 2019. Source: The New York Times
Ruin and recovery, allotted unequally
After eight years of civil war, the Syrian government now controls much of the country, and on Tuesday it appeared closer than ever to seizing control of Idlib, the last of the rebels’ territory.
Whether President Bashar Assad will win has not been in doubt for some time. We — three journalists with The New York Times — had come to Syria to see what his victory looked like.
Visiting five government-held cities and villages over eight days in June, we found ruin and generosity, people grieving and people getting through the day. Suffering had been unequally distributed, landing most heavily on the poor and on former rebel-held areas. The recovery, too, was unevenly shared.
In Damascus, the capital, a gleaming $310 million (AUD $ 460 million) mall, built during the war not far from a mountain where government forces once launched artillery shells at rebel territory, echoed with the clacking of high-heeled shoppers.
In nearby Douma, which was rebel-held for most of the war, running water was still more aspiration than reality. In the government stronghold of Latakia, on the Mediterranean coast, mothers wept beneath photographs of dead sons. More than two years after Assad retook the northern city of Aleppo, the factories and the ancient bazaars, or souks, were stirring again, but electricity was stuttering back one power-crew shift at a time.
It is not only infrastructure that needs rebuilding. The Syria we saw was missing a middle class, its members having fled or fallen down the economic ladder. The United Nations estimates that more than 8 in 10 people are now living in poverty, making less than $3.10 (AUD$4.60) a day per person.
Even as the displaced trickle back home, young men are still being forced into the army, and dissidents, or those connected to them, are disappearing into grim prisons. People are still fleeing the country, though their numbers are far below what they were at their height.
With no reconstruction aid coming from international donors, the Syrians we met were doing what they could to patch the bullet holes in their walls, feed their children and find a paycheck.
And with so many men gone, this task has been left to the old, the very young and, especially, the women — including women from conservative families who are now working for the first time.
“I never thought I’d work, but it’s better than having to go ask people for money,” said Um Akil, a 40-year-old woman in eastern Aleppo. Her husband had been detained by the government — unfairly, she said — but she was surviving. She wanted her daughters to work when they finished school, she said, “so they don’t face what I faced.”
A large banner with the image of President Bashar Assad near a shop in the Old City of Damascus, Syria. Source: The New York Times
Assad is everywhere. So are his underlings.
Everywhere we went, it was impossible to forget who presided over the destruction, and who will preside over what comes next.
“Assad Forever,” proclaimed a banner featuring Assad’s image, one of many strung over Syrian roads.
And his proxies were always present on our trip.
The Syrian government has barred many of our New York Times colleagues and other media outlets for reporting that it considers overly critical, and it had taken the three of us — me, my Lebanese interpreter and an American photographer, Meridith Kohut — nearly half a year to obtain entry.
But a visa didn’t mean permission to roam freely.
Almost everywhere we went, we were chaperoned by government minders, several soldiers and armed plainclothes agents from Syria’s powerful intelligence apparatus. The agents would stand next to us during nearly every conversation with a Syrian. If it was hard for us to talk to people, it was scary for them.
At best, we got a narrow, loyalist’s-eye view of Syria: No one we spoke to blamed the Assad government for the catastrophe that had consumed Syria. Economic collapse was always the fault of American sanctions, not the war or corruption.
Residential buildings destroyed during the war by government forces in eastern Aleppo, Syria. Source: The New York Times
‘We all have the same sad stories’
The minders were eager to show us that life was returning to normal. This was simple enough in Damascus, which had largely avoided physical damage.
Two minutes into our drive from Damascus to Douma, however, the scene outside our car window switched abruptly from a city in motion to a field of inert grey rubble. It seemed to go on for miles, the cigarette ash of the war: apartment buildings that resembled open-air parking garages, doorways spewing grey dust, minarets sticking akimbo out of the wreckage.
In Douma, the downtown souk had a slow-but-steady trickle of customers looking for fruit and cut-rate housewares. But more than a year after the government broke the rebel hold there with a siege that reduced people to eating grass, much of the city remained nearly uninhabitable.
On one block, blackened chandeliers visible through huge gashes in one building mutely testified to Douma’s broken middle class. One of the children playing outside led us upstairs to meet her grandparents, Ali Hamoud Tohme and his wife, known as Um Fares.
The grandparents had returned to their apartment in May, finding it looted and burned. The one piece of furnishing they’d managed to save was a rug that Um Fares took with her when they fled to a basement on the other side of town in the early days of the war. For all the seven years they’d lived underground, sometimes going days at a time without food or water, she had refused to unroll it, awaiting the day they came home again.
By the time they returned, 20 family members had died. She and her husband were raising 11 orphaned grandchildren in a largely abandoned building.
As for the few friends and neighbours who remained, “we avoid seeing each other,” she said, “because we all have the same sad stories.”
Tohme rose and came back with a small glass plate of date- and nut-stuffed pastries. The Syrians we met always offered us something, no matter how little they had. Here in the Tohmes’ living room, it felt ungrateful to refuse.
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‘It was our honour to sacrifice him’
Our government handlers multiplied when we drove to the coastal region of Latakia. Packed with Assad’s fellow Alawite Muslims, a formerly marginalized religious minority whose members stock the army and security services, this was the president’s stronghold.
In the mountain village of Beit Yashout, portraits of young men who had died fighting for Assad — the “martyrs” — gazed down from the telephone poles.
An entourage that included a military general, a village official and two veterans’ affairs officials ushered us from house to house.
I asked one father of a dead soldier, Yassin Hassna, about his sacrifice — whether it had been worth it.
“Anything for Syria’s sake,” he said, his eyes flicking toward the general, who nodded approvingly. “I hope we all become martyrs for the country.”
A mother, Zakiya Ahmad Hassan, showed us the plastic chair where she often sat next to her son’s stone tomb. “It was our honour to sacrifice him,” she said. “He was defending the country.”
Many non-Alawites assume the Alawites have been richly rewarded for their loyalty. But these families were barely getting by. They spoke of being unable to afford milk or baby formula, of the soaring cost of potatoes, oil and sugar. They had stopped going to the butcher.
Hassan swept a hand across the vegetables she was growing near her son’s grave. “Even if the Americans sanction us, at least we can eat cucumbers and bread!” she said.
What does victory look like? At least half a million dead, more than 11 million severed from their homes. Rubble for cities, ghosts for neighbours. Shopping malls for some, home-grown cucumbers for others.
