In-depth: Chemical attacks in Ghouta and Douma killed hundreds of people during Syria's war. After Assad's fall, survivors can tell their stories without fear.
Cian Ward
17 December, 2024
Ghouta, Syria - In August 2013, when Bashar Al-Assad deployed Sarin gas against Eastern Ghouta, Abdullah was tasked with taking the casualties to one of the Damascus suburb's 42 bomb shelter-turned-hospitals.
“It was 5:30 am by the time my team arrived at the site of the attack, the streets were littered with the dead,” remembers Abdullah, who was part of a medical crew. “Their bodies were twisted and their faces purple. It was death without blood.”
More than 1,500 people are thought to have been killed in the attack.
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“I went to my friend's house and knocked at the door, after a while I knocked it down,” he recounts to The New Arab. “Inside I found the mother and father dead. In the room next door, their daughter was dead. In a third were their two babies, also dead. They had all been asleep.”
No one was safe from Assad’s indiscriminate use of chemical weapons, but because the Sarin gas was heavier than air, it sunk down deep into the neighbourhoods' warren of tunnels and bunkers, turning underground hospitals designed to save people’s lives into deadly traps.
“We tried to bring them to an underground hospital, but everyone there was also dead, more than 40 doctors and nurses,” he recounts, his eyes wet with tears.
“People who brought casualties down into the basement were also killed by the chemicals that remained down there. They had killed themselves in their attempt to save others.”
Abdullah believes that Assad decided to use gas against the people of Ghouta because they were the closest to his palace in Damascus. “We were the ones who threatened him the most when he lay in bed at night,” he said.
Ghouta had been a hotbed of dissent during the hopeful days of Syria’s street protests in 2011. By 2012, as the country descended into a state of war, it was captured almost entirely by the opposition. Yet from early 2013, Assad had encircled the neighbourhood, imposing a total siege and cutting off food, gas, and communications to the roughly 400,000 people trapped inside.
A destroyed building in Douma, with the remains of the sand mountains used to fortify the hospital underneath. [Cian Ward/TNA]Basic necessities became scarce, and prices rose. A kilogram of sugar, worth $1 in Damascus, could reportedly fetch $50 in Ghouta. The very soldiers who were bombarding the opposition grew rich facilitating the illicit traffic of goods and arms to the rebels.
In the days after the chemical attack, the regime renewed its offensive against the rebel enclave, but the opposition fought back with new anger, furious at his crimes and expecting the world to come to their aid. Then US president Barack Obama had warned at the time that any use of chemical weapons by the regime against his people “would cross a red line,” and trigger a military response.
But Assad called his bluff and Obama blinked first, with no military response ever coming. According to Abdullah, their abandonment by the international community only stiffened their resolve.
“When the world abandoned us, we realised we were completely alone. It was from that point on we only had two options; total victory or death.”
After the attack, Abdullah joined the White Helmets, helping coordinate search and rescue efforts amid the rain of the government's bombs. His experience still weighs heavily on him.
“Everyone I helped gave me their soul, now I have thousands of souls within me. In every child I saved, I saw my son Mohammed, I saved my son many times.”
Although the use of sarin gas against Ghouta is the most high-profile chemical weapons attack in Syria’s 13-year-long civil war, it is far from the only one. Research by the Berlin-based Global Public Policy Institute found 336 distinctive chemical weapons attacks during the conflict, 98 percent of which can be attributed to the Assad regime.
Amid the preparations for a street party in Douma, on Syria’s first Friday of freedom, a man pointed to a five-storey apartment. “Everyone in this building survived, in that building next door, and every building until the end of the street, they all died,” he told TNA.
In a basement at the end of the street, 52 people, sheltering from the relentless bombing, were all killed.
In 2018, at the tail end of the broader battle for Damascus, Assad once again deployed sarin gas, this time on Douma, a neighbourhood next door to Ghouta.
A resident stands amid the destruction of Douma, which became a barren wasteland under the Assad regime's relentless siege. [Cian Ward/TNA]Douma also underwent terrible hardships during their siege. “We were ringed by snipers, they were always watching, a constant danger in any attempt to leave our basements. Just to get water or look for food requires you to risk your life,” Hassan Al-Tarazi, the headman of Harajiya, an area in Douma, told The New Arab.
“We turned this place into a fortress. The regime was constantly trying to destroy the underground hospitals we built. So we resorted to piling mountains of sand up to the seventh floor of the building under which they sat. They became strongholds, impervious to the bombing.”
Under years of hellfire the cityscape became a barren wasteland, but Douma is not unique. Across the country sit the ruins of numerous Syrian cities, like Homs, Aleppo, and countless others. Bashar Al-Assad burnt it all to the ground in his attempt to cling to power.
“I lost a lot of people during this war. I lost my brother, my closest friend, I lost my three sons,” Al-Tarazi says. He stops speaking and with an exasperated wave of his hand says, “I can continue on with my list for as long as you like, but you get the point”.
'We were used to death'
In a cramped room in a squat house amid the blasted ruins of a long-forgotten battlefield, Bashar Al-Zaher served sweet tea.
He was at work when the screams began. They had heard about Assad’s use of chemical weapons to cleanse belligerent neighbourhoods, so they immediately knew what had befallen them. “I saw people everywhere, dead, I don’t remember how many exactly, but somewhere between 150-200 bodies,” he told The New Arab.
“Their bodies terrified me, their skin was purple and there was foam coming from their mouths. The air was hard to breathe, and the closer I approached those bodies the harder it became,” said Bashar. “We piled them up on lorries in a pile of the dead,” he added.
“We were used to death being all around us, everyday was another misery, normally death comes with blood, and traumatic injuries - but that day was different.”
Unlike in 2013, the chemical attacks on Douma in 2018 elicited a military response from the US, UK, and France. The coalition targeted a select group of military sites that they assessed were involved in Assad’s chemical weapons program.
However, these strikes were a far cry from the intervention that Obama was reportedly mulling in 2013. By this time in the war the opposition was increasingly dominated by Islamist factions - including in Douma itself, which was controlled by Jaysh Al-Islam.
One after the other, these isolated islands fell to the regime's forces, and in Douma as well, just days after the chemical attack, the opposition acquiesced to a deal with the government that would see them given safe passage to Idlib in return for laying down their arms.
In 2018, Abdullah, like many other members of the White Helmets, took a similar offer to leave his home in Ghouta and travel by bus to Idlib, where he would remain in exile for six years, until one day - about a week ago – when it was suddenly over.
“I cried for four hours straight on the road to Damascus. I was only four hours away from my home, but I was separated by a lifetime,” he said, smiling with tears wetting his cheeks.
“God gave the Syrian people victory, not for our sake but for the sake of those martyred on the long road to freedom, and for the sake of our children who we must now build our country for. What use do we have for hope? What we don't have is hope. What we have is the right for something better.”
Cian Ward is a journalist based in Beirut, covering conflict, migration, and humanitarian issues
Follow him on X: @CP__Ward
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