IN SYRIA, the tools of the modern age have failed us. A year ago, an extraordinary image was instantly transmitted across the world, showing a sea of humanity emerging from the bomb-shattered Stalingrad that was Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus.
Besieged by the regime’s forces, thousands converged on a United Nations aid convoy in search of bread. There was simply not enough for everyone.
“Unimaginable” and “unbelievable” were words used in the days after the UN Relief and Works Agency released the picture.
Unimaginable no more. As with so many images of the Syria conflict, whose fourth anniversary is marked today, a photograph that was supposed to turn the tide – and make the horror impossible to accept – has receded into the everyday.
There were many such images. In March 2012, the regime’s artillery devastated the Baba Amr area of Homs. Later that year, the bodies of 100 women and children were laid out in the town of Houla, also near Homs. In May 2013, children with their throats slashed by proregime militias were photographed in the town of Baniyas, south of Latakia. Three months on, the corpses of yet more children were shown, yellow from the regime’s poison gas in East Ghouta near Damascus.
These were monstrosities that no one supposedly would allow to continue – but continue they did, increasingly unnoticed.
Now, even beheadings are too routine to make the front pages, unless the victims are foreigners. Syria’s neighbours, the Gulf states and some Western nations are waging war against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), but the original casus belli – the struggle between President Bashar al-Assad and his majority Sunni population – rages on unabated.
The latest figure of 210,000 for the number of dead is clearly an underestimate.
Nearly half of Syria’s 22million population are now refugees, of whom approaching four million have fled abroad. In Aleppo and Damascus, the regime’s barrel bombs continue to fall.
Meanwhile, Yarmouk remains under siege. So far this year, aid convoys have been allowed in only five times; the occasion on March 5 when 339 families were supplied with food parcels was the first such delivery for three months. The number known to have starved to death is now in three figures.
After four years, the war itself is deadlocked. Neither the long-predicted fall of Mr Assad, nor the encirclement of Aleppo and ensuing collapse of the rebels, has happened. Isil has carved out its own domain.
But lives have changed beyond the power of endurance.
THE BESIEGED
When Mahmoud al-Marjeh’s son Mohanad was killed by a mortar in Yarmouk, he and his wife made a fateful decision: to go back home.
The thought of being away from their remaining son, Mazen, who was still inside Yarmouk, was too great to bear. So they smuggled themselves back into the camp, at a time last year when aid seemed to be getting through.
Then the siege tightened again. “It is as if we are living in some far-off century,” he said last week. “There is no electricity, no water. Food and medicine are hard to find, and when we find it, it’s too expensive.”
The camp has been held by Islamist rebel groups for two years, and the regime’s attempt to smoke them out has caused the ferocious damage to Yarmouk.
But the mortars do not distin- guish between combatant and civilian. Mohanad was 25 when he was hit by a shell. He took three days to die.
Like many others, Mr Marjeh has watched as a popular uprising dissolved into chaos. “The UN did not stand with the Syrian people as it did in other places,” he said. “The world ignored us as if we were not human. Every country looked to its own interests: Iran and Russia supported the regime but the people had nobody on their side.”
THE REGIME’S DEAD
Umm Mohammed buried her sons without their heads. Mohammed, 21, and his brother, Hassan, 18, were regime soldiers. In the early days of the uprising, it was the army that ruled the streets, shooting dead the demonstrators.
But that invincibility disappeared a long time ago. Weakened by defections, the army became increasingly dependent on militias and the Lebanese Shia group, Hizbollah.
Mohammed and Hassan were captured when Isil overran the oilfield they were guarding. They were among nine soldiers to be beheaded.
Like their killers, they were Sunni. Although Syria’s majority Sunnis form the backbone of the rebellion, men from this faith were also represented in the army, even if many defected.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says that Mohammed and Hassan were among at least 22,677 regime soldiers who were killed last year.
Umm Rami said she had hoped her fourth son might be spared service after her other three were all killed. “Rami, 30 and Ziad, 20, were both murdered in al-Shaer,” she said. “Abdelghani, 26, died last year fighting in Deir al-Zour.”
But her fourth son was called up and then wounded in battle. He is in hospital with three bullets in his leg, but still alive.
THE ALAWITES
For decades Ammar’s clothes shop was one of the most popular in Latakia city. Women from Syria’s minority Alawite sect would buy up colourful dresses almost as fast as businessmen could import them.
Now, as the war reaches its fifth year, the only colour customers are wearing is the black of mourning.
The Alawites are the sect of Mr Assad and they comprise the core of the regime, despite making up just a tenth of the Syrian population.
They have to fight to defend their president, who represents the only authority that can protect them, but they attract ever more ire as they do so.
The death toll is staggering. Residents and diplomats estimate that the sect has now lost a quarter of its men of fighting age, perhaps 70,000 in total.
THE ACTIVISTS
Rami Jarrah was given a stark choice: if he wanted his friend released by Isil, he would have to give himself up to them.
“I was a coward,” he said. “I didn’t go”. No one has seen his friend since.
Mr Jarrah runs a radio station trying to operate from rebel-held areas. His friend was the station’s reporter in Raqqa, until the city was seized by Isil. Mr Jarrah, as a secular opposition activist, was already on their hit list.
It had all started so differently. Four years ago, young men like him used Facebook and email to give their accounts of demonstrations, shootings and arrests.
Today, many have been driven out of the country and reduced to looking for jobs in Turkey or visas to the West.
Mr Jarrah is now based in Turkey. Wanted by both the regime and Isil, his vision of a free and secular Syria has long since disappeared.
“The religious reach is much stronger than radio,” he said. “It just seems that to compete with it is impossible.”
But he is not giving up. “I feel as if I don’t own myself at this stage,” said Mr Jarrah. “A lot of people are basically living off the conflict. But if you believe that you had an influence at any stage, you have a responsibility too.”