Still catching their breath

More than a decade on, the scars of Syria's chemical attack survivors are far from faded

- ANAGHA SUBHASH NAIR

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.