Ghouta 13 years on â life in the ruins after deadly sarin attack

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Nebras darts room to room, a phone clutched in both hands, his eyes fixed on the screen. He is smiling. He doesnât look up, doesnât slow, doesnât speak. He is almost 13, and he was born on the morning Syria was gassed.

His mother, Rodina Abdulhadi (37), was scheduled to have a caesarean that day. She and her husband, Mohammed Mnfak (47), spent the night by a Damascus highway, afraid that checkpoints would stop her reaching the hospital. At two in the morning, the rockets fell on the sleeping suburbs of Ghouta. There was no explosion, only a smell moving through the dark. By 4am, Abdulhadi couldnât breathe. Nebras was delivered a few hours later. The nurses didnât bring him to her, and no one told her why.

He never settled. At three months, doctors found his thyroid was failing. His first birthday passed while other babies learned to walk and talk and he did not. âI watched the other children,â says Abdulhadi. âThey understood people. He was not doing any of those things.â He is almost 13 now â minimally verbal, unable to be left on his own, with the understanding of a six-year-old.

Doctors say a mother starved of oxygen can pass that harm to the baby she is carrying. No one has ever examined whether that is what happened to Nebras. âI cannot separate what happened to him,â Rodina says, âfrom what happened that night.â

* * *

In the early hours of 21 August 2013, forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad fired sarin into the opposition districts of Zamalka, Ein Tarma and Jobar in Eastern Ghouta, Syria. The United States put the death toll at 1,429, among them 426 children. Others have put the figure over 1,700. For more than a decade, no one answered for that night. Assad denied it, shielded the men responsible, and used sarin again â at Khan Sheikhoun in 2017, and in at least 10 more attacks recorded by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

When he fled the country in December 2024, that began to change. Investigators for the new government have since found hidden stocks of chemical weapons and arrested eighteen suspects. None has yet stood trial.

The case being assembled concerns the weapons and the men behind them. The victims are not part of it. They became evidence of a chemical attack. Then they were forgotten.

But for them the attack has never ended.

* * *

Assad followed up the sarin attacks with a ferocious assault with conventional weapons that destroyed the entire area. Today, pancaked concrete slabs, twisted rebar, and mounds of rubble line the deserted streets of East Ghouta. The skeletal remains of buildings, their windows reduced to blackened voids, stand in silence. A fountain, once the traditional heart of a Syrian home, remains intact amid the destruction â a reminder of better days, when these streets were filled with life.

Yet an occasional line of laundry fluttering from the balcony of a shattered building hints at lives slowly being carved out among the ruins.

The stairwell leading to the apartment where Abdulhadi and Mnfak live with their children is choked with debris and illuminated by sunlight pouring through bombed-out gaps. They are the only residents left in the heavily damaged building and the only family still living in the neighbourhood.

Inside, the apartment is immaculate. The furniture is carefully arranged, the floors spotless. A crack left by the earthquake of 2023 runs down one wall.

Rodina returned to Jobar 15 days after the birth, still recovering from surgery, Nebras crying in her arms. âThe whole place was empty,â she says. âThere was no life. No people.â They began asking after the people they had known. âWe would ask about someone, and they would say, âHe is dead.â Then someone else, and they would say, âHe is dead too.â After a while, we became afraid to ask.â

Nebras will be 13 on the 13th anniversary of the attack. He has never received help or specialist follow-up for his condition.

Desperate, the family encouraged their eldest son to travel through Libya to Europe, hoping he might be able to help Nebras obtain treatment abroad.

âWhen I sent him, I felt I was sending my son to death,â says Abdulhadi. âBut it seemed the only choice.â

He reached Europe but has not been able to secure help for his brother. Now, he does not want to return to Syria, a place he associates with horror, blood and violence. Abdulhadi does not know when she will see him again.

Mnfak wants those responsible imprisoned. But justice, he says, must also mean treatment for children like Nebras and help for the families left alone with the consequences.

Nobody has offered them either.

She starts to cry.

âI only want my children around me. That is enough for me.â

***

âUnfortunately, I am still alive,â says Mohammed Suliaiman Abo Alkair (38) as he walks through Zamalka. Once a thriving residential area, today it is in ruins. âImagine,â he says. âAll your friends, everyone around you. Whole families. Children playing outside. All of them dead. Our whole lives died. And then you find yourself alone.â

He points to the small green grove of trees where the first sarin rocket landed metres from his apartment. He doesnât know why he and his family survived. No one else anywhere near did â except one young boy, the lone survivor of his family. His own father was laid out among the bodies until someone saw his finger move.

âI walk around every day, and all I see are dead bodies â my relatives, my friends, my neighbours,â says Alkair. âI wish Iâd never come back to this house. The memories never fade.â

He turns into the doorway of a building sandwiched between slabs of concrete and rubble and walks up the broken stairwell into the apartment he is repairing.

Assad followed the sarin attacks that night with a ferocious assault with conventional weapons. A fresh concrete patch hovers on the wall above Alkairâs head as he sits on the couch. Barrel bomb, he explains.

His wife, Naeema Ashoush, brings coffee and sits beside him. She walks with a slight limp, the result of nerve and neurological damage sustained that night, injuries which have left her severely fatigued and frequently short of breath, and nothing like the energetic 18-year-old she was then.

That night, she was eight months pregnant, with her infant son, Siraj, asleep beside her, when a sound she had never heard before woke her.

âLike an old washing machine,â she says. Then came the smell of rotten fruit, the choking, her sight clouding over. Siraj too was struggling to breathe. She pulled him against her chest to protect him, and he clawed at her hands, fighting to get free.

Afterwards he began having frequent convulsions â his eyes rolling back, his body turning blue and then limp. âLike dead,â she says. âLike a piece of wood.â In time it became clear his eyes had been damaged too.

Siraj is almost 13 now. The seizures still come, though less often. His sight is severely impaired. He can play soccer for only a few minutes before he has to stop for breath, and then he watches the other boys carry on without him.

The physical injuries are clear â but the strongest effects are buried inside them.

âOur voices changed. We changed,â says Ashoush. âYou canât tolerate anyone saying even a word. Always upset. Always tense. Always this trembling â like a shaking that comes over you.â

Her nails are digging into her hands. Alkair is staring off into the distance. The sound of TV drifts in from the next room.

âMy mind knows there is no bombing,â Ashoush continues. âBut weâve absorbed it. Itâs tied to my subconscious, my memory. Thereâs always fear.â

Ashoush and Alkair never sleep at the same time. They take the nights in shifts.

âOne person stays awake while the other sleeps, out of fear it might happen again,â she says. âWe keep watching, listening, waiting for something we canât even name.â

She laughs bitterly.

âHow much sweeter were the airstrikes. At least you knew a plane was overhead. But this â what is it?â

***

A few months ago, Samah Mahmoud Al-Bassar (43) tried to end her life. âPeople think that is strange,â she says. âBut what is normal? Someone watches their family die. Lives through chemical attacks. And people expect them to be normal?â

On the night of the attack, she woke to her four-year-old asking for water. She gathered her children into the bathroom and poured water over them, trying to wash away whatever hung in the air. Then they all began to choke. Her uncle and four of his children were already dead. Her eyes clouded over. Half-blind, she carried three of her own â a six-week-old, a two-year-old and the four-year-old â into the street and followed the shapes she could no longer make out. âIt was like being in a coffin,â she says.

Thirteen years on, daylight brings on splitting headaches, and a short walk exhausts her and leaves her short of breath. She is haunted by nightmares, and sometimes it all comes back to her, as if it were happening again. Earlier this year, her oxygen dropped, her vision blurred, and she was back in that night â the smell, the suffocation, the terror.

âMy body remembers,â she says. She cleans houses to keep her children in school, and keeps her own despair hidden from her children. She holds out a black plastic bag overflowing with medications she takes.

Even more painful for her than her own symptoms are the health issues her eldest son, Ghaith, now 16, suffers, issues severe enough to curtail normal activity. When he runs, his lips turn blue. His hands shake. He suffers tremors, is quickly exhausted and out of breath. He notices.

âWhy canât I study like my brothers,â he asks her. âWhy canât I play like other children?â

She has no answer.

âPeople think if someone survived, then they recovered,â she says. âNo. People survived and stayed injured. People survived and stayed afraid.â She pauses. âPeople survived and then had to live. That is harder.â

* * *

These days, survivors who need help call Rafat Yassir Abboudia.

Rafat, now 30, was standing at his front door in Khan Sheikhoun on April 4, 2017, when a Sukhoi came low over the town, dropped its load, circled and returned.

The sarin struck a neighbourhood about a kilometre away. People carried the poisoned to a medical point. Others went back for those lying in the streets.

Then the aircraft returned and bombed the rescuers.

Khan Sheikhoun came four years after Ghouta: after Barack Obamaâs red line, after the agreement intended to remove Syriaâs chemical arsenal, after the world declared that the weapons were being dealt with.

Rafat, then 20, woke in a hospital corridor among people screaming, his chest seizing.

âI was angry,â he says. âThe international community did not act.â

Much of his family did not survive. âThe hardest moment was when a relative asked me to reassure him about his family,â he says. âI knew they were all dead. There were no words.â

Today, working through the Justice for Victims Association, he records testimony and gathers evidence for prosecution, while supporting victims and pushing the authorities to reckon with what sarin does across a lifetime. But most of those who call him are looking for something more immediate: a doctor, treatment, help for the terror haunting their lives.

Rafat understands. His physical injuries eased in the weeks after the attack. The trauma did not. He canât return to Khan Sheikhoun.

âEvery time I remember the massacre,â he says, âI feel like it happened just now.â

* * *

At the edge of Zamalka, where the ruins run to the horizon, stands a cemetery the survivors call the Kimouwee â the chemical-weapons cemetery. Black balloons are painted along its walls, limp bodies hanging beneath them, imprinted with the yellow symbol for chemical danger. A chart lists the dead of that night, each by name and age. Someone has written, in English: Donât Suffocate Truth.

For the survivors, the trial and punishment of the men responsible is not a formality. It will help give them a measure of peace. The arrests are welcome, as far as they go. But beneath them runs a deep anger â at Barack Obama and the red line he drew and did not enforce; at an international community that neither stopped the attack nor helped afterwards; at the years that have passed with no convictions, no punishments, nothing at all. And still no one has counted their injuries, or investigated them, or treated them, and not everyone has even fully admitted they are real.

âIs it possible that the United Nations, the European countries, the United States would leave Iran, Russia, and this bankrupt regime and until now nobody is held accountable?â asks Mohammed Suleiman, âAs if nothing happened? Are Syrian lives worth nothing? Is the blood of Syrians just water?

âWeâve been abandoned,â says Suleiman, staring into the distance. âAt moments now, we say: I wish it had ended. I wish we had died and been done with all of this.â He draws a breath. âAnd now, honestly, Iâm sitting here in 2026 asking: why have I remained alive until now?â DM

Susan Schulman (@susanschulman23) is an award-winning video, photo and print journalist.

Reporting originally appeared via Daily Maverick. Read the full source for additional context.