29
Jail, torture, bereavement,
starvation: one family’s
endless horror in Syria
A war widow, driven from place
to place by years of terror and
violence, tells Bethan McKernan and
Hussein Akoush about her family’s
long-running nightmare as they
wait in Idlib for the regime to strike
Noor al-Dein al-Dimashqi lost her
husband when a Syrian government
airstrike obliterated a marketplace in
Idlib province last month, killing 38
people. Now she longs for the small
moments they used to share.
“What I miss most is drinking our
morning coffee together,” she says.
“We built a life over 30 years and
endured so much together. Death’s
taste is bitter and hard to accept.
Perhaps it’s the only thing humans
never get accustomed to.”
Dimashqi, 45, never expected
to end up in Syria’s Idlib province,caught between President Bashar
al-Assad ’s airstrikes and the power
struggles between moderate rebel
groups and extremist Islamist fac-
tions. The tide of Syria’s war has now
fi rmly turned in the government’s
favour, shrinking the geographical
scope of the fi ghting.
Aid agencies say, however, that
the threat posed to Idlib’s 3 million -
strong population since the regime
launched a new campaign for the
area in April, could trigger the big-
gest humanitarian catastrophe yet of
a confl ict already remarkable for the
scale of its civilian suffering.
In 2011, Dimashqi was living with
her husband and fi ve sons in Ghouta ,
on the outskirts of Damascus. She
had left school at 15 to get married- too young, she says – but man-
aged to build a happy middle-class
life with her husband, Abu Saleem.
He ran a private park, and all fi ve of
their children were supposed to go to
university.
After eight years of civil war, her
life has changed beyond recognition.
Since they were swept up in the giddy
fi rst days of the revolution, the family
has faced nightmare after nightmare:
torture, imprisonment, siege, star-
vation and multiple displacements.
They lost a son, 22-year-old Saleem,
in 2014.
When the rebel enclave of east-
ern Ghouta finally fell to the
regime in March 2018 , pro-govern-
ment members of the family con-
vinced Dimashqi’s husband to go to
Damascus under an amnesty for rebel
fi ghters. But, afraid of living under
Assad again, she and her four sur-
viving children chose to join approx-
imately 1.5 million other Syrians
shuttled into north-west Idlib prov-
ince, the last part of the country with-
out a regime presence.
Her husband eventually decided
that Damascus wasn’t safe and paid a
smuggler $2,000 to take him to rejoin
his family last December. But Idlib,
then ostensibly protected by a cease-
fi re, turned out to be no safe haven
either. He was killed when an airstrike
hit the city of Maarat al-Numan onFrom teenage escort
to French fi lm star
How Zahia Dehar
defi ed her notoriety
Page 35Three wheels sehr gut
Green-minded
Germans swap their
cars for cargo bikes
Dispatch, pages 32-33Continued overleafNoor al-Dein al-Dimashqi with her sons, from left, Hamza, 12, Suleyman, 26, Bilal, 19, and Omran, 22 – taken in Maarat al-Numan last summer, before the death of her husband, Abu Saleem.
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