Ghouta’s mourners slaughtered at the graveside as they buried their dead
The crowd had gathered at a makeshift cemetery in Douma, a neighbourhood of eastern Ghouta, to say a few brief prayers and bury seven people killed in a bomb blast that morning. The mourners separated the corpses – three children, three teenage boys, and one elderly man – with cinder blocks and laid wooden slabs across the blocks to create a new tier for the next set of bodies to come.
As they began laying the bodies into the earth, a jet streaked overhead and fired a rocket into the crowd.
Friends and family leapt into the open graves for safety but when the smoke cleared 11 of their number had been killed. What started as seven deaths had suddenly become 18.
“We don’t have time to bury any one person, to dig him a grave and to honour him,” said Abu Abdelrahman, a father-of-three who was at the graveyard during the air strike. “We just say a quick prayer for everybody and then go back.”
No one knows how many people will be in those mass graves, or buried under the rubble of their homes, by the end of Bashar al-assad’s assault on eastern Ghouta, the last rebel-held suburb of Damascus.
The Syrian leader’s pilots and artillery crews work diligent shifts, according to residents speaking after four days of relentless attacks. They begin their bombardment at around 6am and silence their guns at midnight, giving the 400,000 trapped civilians a few hours’ respite.
At least 310 people have been killed since Sunday and more than 1,550 have been wounded, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR). Dozens of children are among the dead.
One man sounded weary and resigned when The Daily Telegraph reached him by Whatsapp in the basement where he and his family were hiding. “I think the picture is clear now. Look at the photos of body parts on Facebook, they express what I want to say,” he said.
“I will tell you something I saw today,” said Mr Abdelrahman. “I was about 20 metres from our basement and there was a bombardment. I saw one body without a head. It is like Judgment Day here.
“Some people grab their children and they run into a rocket by mistake.”
The world has found relatively little to say about the slaughter in Ghouta, and even less to do about it. For many jaundiced observers of Syria’s seven years of war, the siege feels like a bleak and repetitive sequel to the battle for Aleppo, which ended in 2016.
Theresa May yesterday called on Russia and the Syrian regime “to ensure this violence stops and those people in need of help are given that help”.
Zeid Ra’ad al-hussein, the United Nation’s human rights chief, called the onslaught a “monstrous campaign of annihilation”. António Guterres, the UN Secretary General, has pleaded for a ceasefire and the Security Council is expected to meet this week to discuss the situation and vote on a possible resolution. But previous efforts to secure a truce here have foundered in the face of Russian objections and threats to use their UN veto.
Jaish al-islam, one of the main Islamist rebel groups in eastern Ghouta, said it was trying to negotiate a local ceasefire in discussions with Russia, but had so far been unsuccessful.
The vast majority of this week’s deaths have been in rebel-held areas, but regime-controlled Damascus has not been totally spared. Rebel forces have shelled indiscriminately into the Syrian capital, killing more than a dozen people so far this week, according to state media.
Funerals in eastern Ghouta have become shorter and shorter as death becomes an ever bigger part of everyday life. The suburb’s main cemetery was in northern Douma, at
‘I saw one body without a head. It is like Judgment Day. Some people grab their children and they run into a rocket by mistake’
the foot of a mountain range controlled by regime forces. By mid-2012 the cemetery was being hit regularly with artillery and so residents began burying their dead further south in an open field.
Most burials happen at night now in an effort to avoid the warplanes and helicopters overhead.
The dead are stacked in tiers and grave diggers often pull a tarpaulin over their grave sites while they work to hide them from aircraft. Funeral prayers are rushed and the mosque’s loud speakers urge people to get off the streets and back to their shelters.
“We used to do long processions, where people would walk to the cemetery behind a car,” said Haitham, a father-of-one, as he remembered the early days of the war.
“But we don’t do this anymore, we take them directly to the cemetery now. No one wants to be targeted while walking behind a dead person.”