Inside the Divided Town That’s Become a Microcosm of the Syrian Conflict

By Donatella Rovera, Amnesty International’s Senior Crisis Researcher

A different version of this article has appeared on http://www.newstatesman.com/.

Once a thriving hub of Syria’s oil industry, today Deir Ezzour has become a bleak microcosm of Syria’s conflict. The town, on the banks of the Euphrates River, some 280 miles north-east of the capital, is divided. Half is under the control of Syrian government forces. The other half is in the hands of armed opposition fighters, who also control much of the surrounding areas all the way to the Iraqi border.

Few outsiders make it to this isolated region. No human rights organizations and only a handful of journalists have visited the town. The opposition-controlled section of Deir Ezzour is the only area I can access, as the Syrian government has banned Amnesty and other human rights organizations from areas of the country it controls. The streets are eerily quiet and much of the town is in ruins. Many of the residents have fled. The empty shells of burned and bombed-out buildings line the streets – a testament to the unrelenting air strikes, artillery, mortar and tank shelling by President Bashar al-Assad’s troops.

The only way in or out of Deir Ezzour is across a bridge which regularly comes under sniper fire from government forces. There is, unsurprisingly, little traffic. A few taxis ferry residents back and forth, driving at breakneck speed to dodge the bullets. Those who dare to cross – civilians and fighters alike – are often killed or injured in the process.

Within two hours of my arrival in the town, I am at a local hospital, where the reality of that risk strikes home. A young man has been shot while crossing the bridge. He is pronounced dead almost immediately. He never stood a chance; a large-caliber bullet had left a gaping wound in his head. Everyone I meet has lost relatives and friends, many in the constant indiscriminate bombardments, while others have been summarily executed.

Abd al-Wahed Hantush, a 38-year-old firefighter, tells me how he lost six members of his family last October. His mother, wife and two children were killed when their car came under fire as they tried to cross from a government-controlled area back to the other side of town. His brother and sister-in-law were also killed in the incident, along with dozens of other civilians.

“They had gone to visit my sister in the al-Jura district of the city, which is under the control of government forces,” Abd al-Wahed says. “There was no way back except through the hills on the outskirts of the city. There are often government soldiers in that area, but it was the only way.”

They never made it back. Their bodies – slaughtered and half-burned – were discovered the following day. Abd al-Wahed’s eyes well up with tears as he shows me photographs of his five-year-old daughter, Sham, and his three-year-old son, Abderrahman, on his mobile phone.

“They were all I had. I’ve lost everything,” he said.

Abd al-Wahed has cuts and burns on his face, neck, chest and arms. Four days earlier, he had gone to put out a fire in a house which was hit by a rocket.

“When I got there another rocket fell and exploded very near where I was,” he says.

He’s lucky to be alive. Two more rockets struck the area soon afterwards.

Rockets and shells pound Deir Ezzour day and night, smashing into residential buildings or landing in the streets. For the civilians left in town, there’s little they can do to keep safe. The nights are punctuated by the thumping sound of incoming artillery, and occasionally the sound of outgoing mortars fired by the armed opposition groups reverberates across the town. Everywhere, fragments of the Grad rockets fired by government forces from a hill overlooking the town litter the ground.

I visit a family with two small children who are now living in their shop in the basement of a building.

“There is shelling all the time, but sometimes it is unbearable. During the week of May 23, it was relentless. Batteries of 12 rockets would land in quick succession. It went on at that pace for two weeks; it was impossible to go out even to get bread,” the children’s father explained. “We avoid going out as far as we can; here we are a bit protected.”

Few families have a basement in which to shelter.

Meanwhile, a children’s playground in one corner of the town has been converted into a cemetery. Tombstones surround the colorful slides, no longer in use as children are now kept indoors. Some of the graves belong to children who used to play there. In one corner of the deserted playground is a particularly well-tended grave. It belongs to 11-year-old Ahmad Karjusli, who was killed on October 19 last year. Local residents tell me that the child’s mother spends every afternoon by his grave. Later that day, I find her there – alone and crying. Her mobile phone lay on the grave mound playing religious music.

“I only had two children and Ahmad was my youngest, my darling,” she tells me. “He was such a good boy. My life is empty without him. Why was he taken from me? I cannot bear the pain.”

She shows me photographs of him on her mobile phone; he looks very much like his mother. Ahmad was standing by his own front door along with a four-year-old neighbor, Abderrahman Rayyash, when a shell landed in the street and killed them both.

As has happened all too often in the Syrian conflict, it is civilians who have borne the brunt of the spiraling violence. In Deir Ezzour, as elsewhere, the suffering is also hardening feeling among a civilian population who feel increasingly abandoned by the rest of the world. When I mentioned to townspeople that I wanted to investigate sectarian violence allegedly carried out by armed opposition groups in the nearby town of Hatla (like Deir Ezzour, Hatla is predominantly Sunni Muslim), some expressed disapproval and others discouraged me from going. Many were distinctly unsympathetic to the plight of their Shi’a neighbours and others worried that what I would discover could tarnish the image of the Syrian uprising.

Pain, loss and anger can make people blind or indifferent to the suffering of others. This is something I have come across all too often in the many conflicts and wars I’ve worked on over the years and Syria is no different. The longer this increasingly brutal conflict goes on, the greater the damage will be to the very fabric of Syrian society – and the harder it will be for the wounds of this conflict to heal.