Pakistani man who lived in Ghouta shares tales of death and despair
Akram’s wife details their escape as planes dropped bombs on the home they left behind
The image of a small, limbless girl lying in a hospital in Ghouta is burnt into the memory of Mohammad Fadhl Akram, one of the first people to flee a rebel Syrian city under bombardment from government forces.
Years of siege left the enclave a desperate place, where hungry people depended on the kindness of neighbours for food; where disease lurked in the faltering water supply and where death fell from the sky in a hail of rockets.
Initially the violence that engulfed his adopted country since 2011 did not worry Akram, a Pakistani who arrived in Syria in 1974 and took two wives — a woman from Ghouta, Rabah Jarrad, and Saghran Bibi, a Pakistani cousin.
Then foreign militants came. Two of his sons enlisted in an armed group, while a third was caught up in street violence in 2013. Akram remembers darkness thickening as the family waited for their son to return home.
When he did, he lay lifeless in the back of an ambulance.
The boy’s mother “could not stand it, she had a heart attack” and died, says Akram, who is now in Pakistan, clutching Rabah’s blue passport.
Scavenging for food
As the war progressed they found themselves witnessing the progressive annihilation of its population. Corpses became commonplace as rockets rained down; images of human beings strewn among rubble are seared into his mind.
The sight of a girl “without arms and legs” particularly haunts Akram. They scavenged in garbage for fuel, washed clothes in ash, and as water ran short did not shower for months.
“There was no salt, no sugar, no tea, nothing ... We ate leaves,” said Akram.
A livid scar on Akram’s abdomen, which he pulls his white shalwar kameez up to reveal, bears witness to an appendectomy performed without anaesthetic in a clinic that lacked both drugs and doctors.
Last February 18 Syrian president Bashar Al Assad’s forces turned their full fury on this holdout enclave on the edge of Damascus.
For Akram and his wife Bibi, evacuated in a “humanitarian pause” announced by Russia earlier this month, the increasing desperation of the five-year siege — and the children and grandchildren they were forced to leave behind — will forever haunt them.
The terrifying final month of government bombardment at first brought Bibi a kind of acceptance of the inevitability of death, and she felt stronger.
But her husband began to deteriorate. “He ... stopped eating, and even drinking water.”
By chance they met a journalist, who warned the Pakistani embassy in Damascus of their plight. On March 1, Akram and Bibi were the first residents of Ghouta to be evacuated.
Bibi described their fearful journey out, passing through four checkpoints as planes roared overhead, dropping their bombs on the home they had left behind.
She was so weak that by the third checkpoint she could no longer stand, and had to be given oxygen in an ambulance.
At the embassy, horrified officials tried to feed them to strengthen their malnourished bodies.
But the grief was setting in. “I was so sad,” Akram sobs. “I left behind 40 years of work, my house, my grandchildren running between my legs.”
Weeks later and thousands of kilometres away in Pakistan, the couple have not yet adjusted. Motorbikes sound like planes, slamming doors like bombs.
“They are destroyed from within,” sighs their nephew Mohammad Irfan, who has taken them in.