Special Envoy to Damascus (Syria)I google who Charles Duhigg is. Google says: “American journalist and non-fiction author. He was a journalist from the New York Times and a 2013 Pulitzer Prize winner for a series of investigative reporting on Apple and other technology companies.”
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Charles Duhigg, who according to Wikipedia lives in California, must not know that one of his bestsellers it is displayed on the counter of one of the few bookstores in Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus torn apart by Syria’s war. The title of the book, seen from here, looks like a bad joke: The power of habits. Why do we do what we do in life? The slogan that appears printed on the cover presents it as an “essential manual for life”
What is life for Duhigg? What is life for Ghouta survivors?
“We reached inhuman limits, we began to hate our own souls. We prayed to God to take us away. We had no food, we had no water, we had no light. We began to eat animal feed and leaves from trees” , Anwar, a young man from Ghouta, told me yesterday.
“Right here where we are now, I saw how snipers killed three boys who were trying to cross the street. We were unable to leave the house for eight months. Al-Assad’s soldiers were shooting at everyone,” said, also yesterday, a woman from Ghouta in his 50s who preferred not to give his name. Her two children were killed. The husband died of a heart attack soon after. She thinks it was because of so much sadness.
Is there an “essential manual for life” for people who have had to live this life?
Ghouta is a district on the outskirts of Damascus, the Syrian capital. Ghouta was the scene of one of the worst massacres by Bashar al-Assad’s army against the civilian population. In Syria, there are many Ghoutes. There have been many Ghoutes in the world.
The Syrians are talking again
The fall of the Al-Assad regime just a week ago has and will have countless impacts. There is one that is particularly important: Syrians are talking again. After fifty years of bloodthirsty dictatorship, the civilian population can openly explain what they have experienced. In scenarios like Ghouta this takes on a high dimension.
Yesterday, in Ghouta, everyone wanted to talk.
The offensive by the regime’s troops against the rebel militias that controlled these areas of northern Damascus lasted five years. Al-Assad’s soldiers, armed by Vladimir Putin’s Russia, ended the siege on April 14, 2018. During this time, everything fell on Ghouta and its civilians. Also some of the worst chemical attacks in the recent history of warfare. In 2013, one such attack would have killed up to 1,400 people. Al-Assad always denied it. Putin, too.
In 2017, the French newspaper Liberation dedicated a powerful cover to it, which went around the world and is still remembered. Assad’s children [Els infants d’Assad]titled in capital letters. The photo, which took up the entire page, was the corpses of eight children lying on the ground with their bodies dislocated, their eyes open, and some with clumps of white foam coming out of their noses and mouths.
Yesterday I was showing this cover to a group of men having tea in a barbershop. The owner of the establishment acted as spokesperson.
— Did you witness this attack?
– Yes. Of this and others. Chemical attacks are easy to identify. Once you hear the explosion you begin to notice that you are short of air and a strange feeling in your throat.
— You knew these children [de la portada]?
— Not these, but we do know other children who died. I saw with my own eyes children with this foam at the mouth. Some entire families died in their sleep, poisoned.
The most common compound used in this type of attack is sarin gas. It is lethal in low doses and can cause death within minutes of exposure.
Ryad Graheh is one of the men in the barber shop. The rest of the men pointed at him. He spoke: “I am the last one left of my family.” In 2012, regime soldiers went to his home and made his parents, three brothers and three sisters disappear. He was saved because he had fled Ghouta for fear of being recruited by the army.
— Do you know if they are dead?
— Only God knows. Someday we will meet again.
Syria is full of missing corpses. The regime buried them in mass graves without locating them. I used to burn them. Some voices say that they were crushed. They didn’t want to leave a trace. After fifty years of dictatorship and thirteen of inhumane civil war, it is impossible to have approximate figures. The most accepted calculations speak of 300,000 to 600,000 dead.
“Ask the people here in Ghouta. 95% will tell you that they have relatives killed during the war,” said one of the boys, Yaser Alagwad. He was right.
Privileged views of the destruction
Throughout history, several renowned psychologists have tried to get into the minds of dictators with their hands stained with blood. The psychologist who wants to analyze the thoughts of Bashar al-Assad should bear in mind a geographical factor: his presidential palace, now looted and occupied by the rebels who have overthrown the regime, is located on a hill above Damascus, from which he had a privileged view to observe the destruction caused by the bombs he ordered to fire.
He dropped a lot of bombs, because the surroundings of the capital, where Ghouta is located, look like the sets of a horror movie. There are many buildings reduced to skeletons or, outright, rubble. It is believed that there are still corpses that have been under the rubble for ten years. It is an insistent landscape in Syria. Can a country that has been so destroyed be rebuilt?
Syria
In Ghouta even the cemeteries are surrounded by destruction. It’s a macabre picture: the dead rest surrounded by the context that killed them. Most of the victims of the chemical attacks are believed to have been buried in a newly established cemetery on the outskirts of the suburb.
Yesterday I was visiting with Tambee Shabsogh, who in another life was a tour guide and now guides foreign journalists who are finally able to enter Syria easily. Shabsogh explained that the local population had dug a mass grave behind the cemetery because the deaths from the chemical attack were many and there was no room. He also explained that when the regime finally conquered Ghouta, they dug up all the dead from the pit and made them disappear. Why? Recurring answer: “To leave no trace”. Shabsogh pointed out all the small graves that were scattered throughout the cemetery. “They were children”. Three years, four, six, three, babies, five years. Shabsogh would break down and start crying. “I’m sorry; in Syria we all have our stories. Sometimes you hear such horrible things that you think: it can’t be true. But they are always true”.
Soldiers in the force
Indeed, everyone has their story. And Adnan Hassen insisted yesterday that he wanted to explain it. He went for plastic chairs and planted them in the middle of the stairs of his house in central Ghouta, just a few meters from where one of the barrels full of toxic gas dropped from regime helicopters hit.
Adnan Hassen is 25 years old and won’t talk about the chemical attacks on Ghouta, although he might, because he was there too. He will talk about a topic of special interest these days: How is it possible that the army of a historical regime like that of Al-Assad put up so little resistance to the lightning offensive of the Syrian rebels?
— In 2019 I was recruited by the regime’s troops. I have spent my last five years forced to be part of Al-Assad’s army. I just got back home.
— Did you hate Bashar al-Assad?
— With all my strength. Dude, you don’t know how happy I was when they told me he had run away.
— And what did you do?
— I was assigned to the border with Jordan. Last weekend, when I heard that the rebels had taken control of Aleppo, I escaped from the army. I tore up my card, burned my uniform and left at night, at one in the morning.
— Did more soldiers do the same as you?
– Clear Many more. I think most of us Al-Assad soldiers were fed up with Al-Assad, or had been forcibly recruited.
The staircase of Adnan Hassen’s house where we did the interview yesterday had no roof or walls surrounding it. It was another architectural skeleton devoured by the bombs of the regime. He wanted to do the interview there in honor of his father. Their father died in 2015 in the bombing ordered by Bashar al-Assad that left them without a home.