Just 15 kilometers from the center of Damascus, Douma was in 2011, before the start of the Syrian civil war, a prosperous peripheral town whose 150,000 inhabitants felt confident, despite their traditional religiosity, in the face of secularism and modernity. of the country. capital. Today, only a third of them remain there. The traces of destruction on the square of the central mosque, where opposition groups met to organize the fight against the regime, now bear witness to the fate of The main insurgent enclave in Damascus. Its civilian population suffered a five-year siege of starvation, some of the worst chemical attacks of the conflict and a brutal crackdown that emptied their homes and razed their streets, transforming 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 a look of hatred in his eyes, despite his apparent casualness. “Syria will not forget crimes of Bashar al-Assad.” His forge, located on Douma’s main shopping street, stands on the site of his family clan’s building, destroyed by Syrian army missiles on February 22, 2018. He lost 17 members of his extended family, including one of his loved ones. 20 year old sons.

“The last 13 years have been hell for us (…) we lost a large part of our family, our homes, our businesses,” he recalls, pointing to the rusty remains of a rocket in this which was once the basement. Death, destruction and ruin are Assad’s legacy in Douma. “Until recently, I had to hide another of my sons, aged 20, to prevent him from being mobilized and sent to the Aleppo front (in the north of the country),” he admits. with the fear that struck thousands of Syrian parents in 2017. the final stages of the regime.

Reconstruction is now the main concern of residents. Engineer Issa Muktaal, 62, heads the municipal administration of Douma. From town hall, he directs the city’s public services as interim mayor. “Some 8,000 people have already returned to the city since the fall of Assad, but we do not have the capacity to welcome them,” he laments.

Next to him sits one of the first returnees, Rachid Tammar, 40, who describes himself as a “businessman”. He returned to his city from Idlib in northern Syria, where he was expelled by the regime in 2018 after the opposition capitulated in Douma. His return is now triumphant, shortly after the Islamist brigades of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) took control of the Syrian capital. “I came to advise the new municipal officials on a voluntary basis,” he explains, impeccably dressed in the midst of the poverty of Douma. Before leaving, he repeats the usual slogans of the authorities of the new Syria: “There will be no personal revenge, 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 for opposition strongholds 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 has led to deaths from hunger and lack of medical care. Some 100,000 civilians remained stranded in the region.

Samir Aredin, a 32-year-old businessman, still lives on the same street in Douma where 43 civilians were killed in a chemical weapons attack by the regime in 2018. Among them were his wife and two children. He was the victim of serious chlorine gas poisoning, like hundreds of other residents, which left him with serious after-effects. He still seems stunned by the toxic contents of the gas cylinders dropped from a helicopter on the building where he lived. “I will not rest until the culprits are found guilty,” he says with determination. “There were no opposition militia posts on this street, only ordinary people. No one who committed such a horrible crime can be forgiven, no one,” he warns. “The attack was launched to force the surrender of opposition forces, ready to fight,” he explains. His accusation was confirmed in 2020 by United Nations investigators.

Another chemical attack attributed to government forces left hundreds dead (more than 1,000 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, even though the United Nations suspects it retained at least 1% of the deadly and toxic materials it stockpiled. The investigators of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons confirmed the chlorine gas attack carried out on the streets of Douma in 2018 and attributed it to the Tiger Brigades, the regime’s elite forces. The use of these deadly weapons is prohibited by the Chemical Weapons Convention, ratified by Syria in 2013. The United States has just confirmed that it is working, through its allies on the ground in Syria, to destroy remaining chemical weapons depots. in the Arab country following the elimination of 1,300 tonnes of toxic products carried out by the international community in 2014.

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