Inside Daraya: The Syrian town starved by Assad and freed by its people
In-depth: Daraya, an epicentre of non-violent resistance, faced massacres and starvation under the Assad regime. Now free, residents are returning to rebuild.
9 January 2025
Damascus, Syria — 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.