Damascus - The scenes in Daraya, a small town on the outskirts of Damascus, are dystopian. Skeleton frames of buildings protrude from expansive fields of rubble - entire neighbourhoods devastated by the Assad regime and its bloody battles against local rebels.
At the outset of the Syrian revolution in 2011, Daraya was an epicentre of non-violent resistance to the regime. Mass protests were held regularly, where crowds would wave flowers in the air as a sign of peace.
But these flowers were met with bullets when the Assad regime and its allied forces violently responded to the protests. On 20 August 2012, regime forces began to indiscriminately shell residential areas and hospitals. They soon entered the town and in a 72-hour window carried out a bloody massacre, committing mass executions of men, women, and children.
Within six days, between 20 and 26 August, the regime killed over 700 people - one of the bloodiest massacres of the Syrian conflict.
Heavy fighting and periods of regime-imposed sieges and forced starvation were ongoing in Daraya until 2016, when a deal was reached to allow rebel fighters and civilians to evacuate their town.
“The decision was very hard, but we had no choice but to retreat,” Amer Khoshini, a 35-year-old fighter with the ‘Free Army Daraya’, a local faction of the Free Syrian Army, told The New Arab. “In the final four months, there was no medicine, no food, and only about 700 fighters, about 400 of whom were injured, but still fighting,” he added.
So Khoshini, along with around 700 armed men, climbed aboard regime-chartered buses and were taken to the opposition-held city of Idlib, in northwest Syria.
Eight years later, on 7 December 2024, they joined forces with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (or HTS) in its lightning assault across Syria, and the Daraya rebels returned to their town, freeing it from Assad’s grasp.
“Now, the people are breathing again. After fifty years of oppression, they can finally breathe,” Khoshini said.
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'Weapons in the hands of civilians'
Rebels with the Free Army Daraya were stationed around the small town, some wearing civilian clothes and holding heavy assault rifles. Others were gathered at Daraya’s police station, where a white pick-up truck was parked outside, with a machine gun mounted on top.
From his office at the police station, Khoshini said when they first arrived “people were afraid of us, but we assured them we’re not murderers or robbers”.
He added: “We want everyone to have a better life and we don’t want problems with any Syrian.”
Assault rifles, among them AK-47s and other AK variants, were piled high in a room next to Khoshini’s office. One of the rebels’ first tasks was collecting the weapons from civilians.
“There’s weapons in the hands of civilians, people are still not convinced that they don’t need to protect themselves anymore,” Khoshini said.
Once a national army is formed, Khoshini said the Free Army Daraya would hand over its weapons. “Most of us weren’t in the military before [the Syrian uprising],” he said.
Khoshini studied economics and his colleague, Arabic Literature. “We have doctors, lawyers, and others who couldn’t continue their studies,” he said, noting that they were looking forward to resuming their careers in Daraya.
The military commander of HTS said on 17 December that all rebel factions would “be disbanded and the fighters trained to join the ranks of the defence ministry”.
Attempting to rebuild
Khoshini had already set aside his weapons, taking up the huge responsibility of organising civilian affairs in the town - neglected by the regime for almost thirteen years.
“When the regime’s army took over Daraya, their excuse was that they kicked out the terrorists, but the truth is that when they were in power, they made the situation worse. They did not fix anything, not even the roads, or houses,” he said.
Khoshini helped form multiple committees to facilitate different tasks such as ensuring fuel and bread were available, cleaning the streets, and running an official platform for the news, to tackle the spread of false information. They were also attempting to open a medical centre and begin reconstruction on schools, he said, with the town’s health and education sectors degraded under Assad’s rule.
“We’re working within the small capabilities we have,” he said.
One of their largest challenges would be to rebuild the town’s devastated infrastructure. Khoshini said that 90 percent of the infrastructure had been destroyed in the war and there were no organised electricity networks, which was preventing many of Daraya’s residents who had fled elsewhere from returning.
Before 2011, Daraya had around 350,000 residents, but its population has dropped to just over 120,000 after the vast majority of people fled the city, Khoshini said.
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'Now, the fear is gone'
Ahmad Sareem, 75, sat with his friends amid the hollowed-out buildings and rubble of Daraya, enjoying a warm pot of coffee. “Now, the fear is gone,” he told TNA, smiling.
Sareem said that under Assad’s reign, he was afraid to leave Daraya, terrified he might get taken at one of the many checkpoints outside the city. Just having Daraya written on your ID could mean arrest, he said.
In 2016, Sareem’s son, Mohammad Ali Sareem, was stopped and arrested at an army checkpoint when he was attempting to flee the city. “They accused me of being a terrorist, just because I’m from Daraya,” Mohammad, 49, told TNA.
Mohammad was imprisoned for four years and seven months. He was transferred between multiple prisons, held in cramped and unsanitary conditions, tortured, and denied access to food.
He said he was often hung inches off the ground by his wrists, handcuffed to a metal rod for lengthy periods. Sometimes the prison guards would stab sharp metals into his arms, stepping on them so they pierced through his skin and flesh.
As a result, Mohammad suffered severe nerve damage, and can no longer hold on to or carry items like he used to, affecting his ability to work and everyday life, he said.
Yasser Jamal el-Deen, 38, was working with the Free Daraya Army to help residents locate their loved ones in Assad’s prisons. He told TNA they recorded around 5,212 people from Daraya arrested since 2011. Roughly 2,298 had been released or their bodies uncovered, but the other half were still missing.
'We are mentally exhausted'
Many of Sareem’s relatives had been arrested by the regime - not uncommon for someone from Daraya, he said. His daughter, Rawda Ahmad Sareem, 42, lost her husband to Assad’s prison system in 2012.
She still keeps his picture on her WhatsApp profile: a young man with a soft face, glasses, and wearing a burgundy collar shirt. She told TNA the photo was taken just before he was arrested, when he was only 29.
Rawda and her husband had four children together. “They don’t forget their father, they still remember him and they hope that he is still alive and will come back,” she said.
“We were adapting to his absence for a while, trying to forget, but recently with the current events, we remembered everything again,” she added, referencing the overthrow of the regime and subsequent mass release of prisoners. “We are mentally exhausted,” she said.
“Now, kids are saying, ‘But Moma, the regime’s gone, so why isn’t Daddy home yet?’,” Arwa Damon, the president and founder of the International Network for Aid, Relief and Assistance (INARA), told TNA.
Damon recently visited Daraya with INARA, working with local partners to build child-friendly spaces and provide psychosocial support for children and their mothers.
“For kids from an area like Daraya you have the trauma of the constant bombardment, the trauma of fear, the trauma of watching your parents no longer be able to be the pyramids of security and stability for you… of watching your father being killed or disappeared,” she said.
“It’s a very compounded, layered, intense trauma, that only now does the space exist for organisations to be able to address it.”
She noted that in former regime-held areas, compared to elsewhere in Syria, there is significantly less expertise and capacity to provide psychosocial support.
“When traumas are ongoing, you cannot push a child into a space where they are having to revisit the trauma, unless you can create a safety net for them,” she said. “Syria wasn’t conducive for this safety net…”
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'Building a better generation'
In the centre of Daraya, a young boy, not more than eight years old, fiddled with stones and hopped over pieces of debris, adventuring through his makeshift playground.
“The kids here, they’ve never seen a soft surface, like the one that gets put down [in a play area],” Damon said.
“They’ve never had access to that many toys and child-friendly activities,” she added, commenting on the child-friendly spaces INARA helped build.
Khoshini, back at the police station, said that the “biggest difficulty we’re going to be facing” is Daraya’s young generation, neglected by the regime and “raised on fear and bribery”.
He said the regime banned youth groups in mosques or centres in Daraya, recreational trips, and educational courses, which are important to instil positive values in young people.
“Concrete walls and houses can be restored easily, compared to the rehabilitation necessary for our young generation,” he said.
“But thankfully, we have many educated people willing to take on this difficult task toward building a better generation.”
Hanna Davis is a freelance journalist reporting on politics, foreign policy, and humanitarian affairs.
Follow her on Twitter: @hannadavis341