Ghouta a tale of courage
Al Assad has perfected a system of nihilism that wipes out people who oppose him, but some are still resilient
The siege of Eastern Ghouta has turned into one of the longest and most destructive sieges in recent wars — about a year longer than the nearly fouryear-long siege of Sarajevo. Ghouta is an area of small towns and fertile countryside east of Damascus.
The people of Eastern Ghouta joined the protests against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad in March 2011, in the very early days of the Syrian uprising, and government forces killed many young men there. I arrived in the Douma district in April 2013 and lived with a Civil Defence unit that came to be known as the White Helmets. Regime planes bombed the region daily. I saw the bodies of the dead being brought to the Civil Defence unit every day for registration. One day, there were nine bodies. Another day, 26.
Yet, people were still hopeful despite everyday life’s becoming increasingly difficult. On August 21, 2013, the Al Assad regime attacked Eastern Ghouta with sarin gas and killed more than 1,400 civilians, including 426 children.
A deal between the United States and Russia forced the Al Assad regime to agree to surrender its chemical weapons to United Nations investigators, but the then US president Barack Obama decided not to enforce a no-fly zone over Syria. Al Assad concluded that he could use all other weapons, including barrel bombs and starvation, to crush the uprising.
A month after the chemical weapons deal, in October 2013, Al Assad’s forces intensified the siege of Eastern Ghouta. Even people who needed medical care were prevented from leaving or getting help from outside. Arbitrary daily bombings turned life precarious; people struggled even to retrieve corpses from the rubble of their houses.
When I left Eastern Ghouta for Raqqa in the summer of 2013, the cost of everyday amenities had already increased significantly because of the war. Our only electric supply was a generator for four hours a day.
By the fall of 2013, along with Eastern Ghouta, the rebel enclaves of Darayya, Mouaddamiyya, Nadaya and Zabadani, which are close to Damascus, were also under siege, being bombed and starved. Eastern Ghouta showed great resilience and embraced innovative ways to survive. People continued growing food on their farms, and that partly helped keep hunger at bay. They found a way to breach the siege by digging a network of underground tunnels, some of which led to neighbourhoods in Damascus and were used to smuggle in necessary commodities.
Embracing wild herbs
Numerous conversations with friends and acquaintances still living there give me a fuller sense of how they survived. People recycled plastic garbage and extracted fuel from it. They used this fuel for the generators that had been smuggled in through the tunnels. The electricity this generated became essential to connect with satellite internet and the outside world. They ground fodder and used it as flour to bake bread; they toasted oats and used it to make a beverage to replace coffee. They embraced wild herbs, which were untouched in peace, as a staple vegetable. They turned the basements of hospitals and schools into storage facilities in the face of the barrel bombs.
Medicines, medical equipment, electronics and building equipment were strictly prohibited from entering the besieged area. The people of Eastern Ghouta were left with few resources and a terribly depleted capacity to buy anything. The few sources of support were financial aid from a group of non-government organisations and some religious networks. By 2017, the fourth year of the siege, Al Assad’s forces had taken control of many neighbourhoods from the rebels. In March, the regime took Barzeh and Qaboun, two neighbourhoods in Damascus that were crucial for the survival of the besieged areas. The tunnels that the opposition had dug to bring in supplies led from Eastern Ghouta to Barzeh and Qaboun. Al Assad’s forces destroyed the tunnel network and blocked the supplies.
First to starve and die
Within days of the fall of Barzeh and Qaboun, the price of diesel jumped to about $10 (Dh36.78) per litre from about 63 cents per litre. The season for harvesting crops and planting vegetables was days away. The farmers couldn’t afford the fuel for their agricultural tools — generators, water pumps, tractors. They simply couldn’t water their lands or even harvest the crops. Children were the first to starve and die. And that is when the images of the emaciated, undernourished children began coming out of Eastern Ghouta.
Eastern Ghouta has been turned into a concentration camp by the Al Assad regime. Al Assad has perfected a system of political nihilism, which wipes out people who oppose it and enslaves those who acquiesce and submit. Even after five years of siege and bombardment, the residents are holding on to human dignity, mourning each death, not turning callous in the face of its familiarity.
Yassin al-Haj Saleh is a prominent Arab intellectual and author from Syria. He lives in exile in Germany.