In a narrow, forgotten alley in one of Baghdad’s many sprawling neighborhoods, a man lives in near-total isolation. At night, he drifts alone along the dwindling fords of the Tigris. His stay here is temporary, a pause before what seems to be his final journey.
In his pocket are several documents: an Iraqi ID under the name Salim al-Jabouri, a Russian passport for a Vasily and, between them, a military ID with yet another name, identifying him as a colonel in the Syrian air force. That military card holds his real identity. For the purpose of this investigation, we will use his pseudonym: al-Douri.
Between these identities, al-Douri waits for his meeting with a local fixer who promises him a ticket to Moscow without ever crossing the airport’s surveillance cameras. The price is $3,000. The fixer had already pulled off the impossible once, procuring him a genuine Russian passport from the dark web. There are always people for impossible jobs.
When Bashar al-Assad’s regime collapsed on Dec. 8, 2024, Moscow became the refuge of choice for fleeing loyalists: commanders, officers and, at the top, Assad himself. In going to Moscow, al-Douri was not hoping to run into the fugitive president. “If I ever saw the bastard, I’d kill him,” he told New Lines in a private Telegram exchange.
By the spring of 2025, al-Douri had spent nearly five months in Baghdad, haunted by nightly visions tied to his last days of service at Stamu air base, south of Latakia, where he spent his final days in the air force. In his dreams, he stood before a judge wearing thick glasses and was sentenced to hang a hundred times, once for every sortie he flew over Syria. In the latest nightmare, he found himself clutching a barrel bomb, hurled from a plane onto his own helicopter, parked on the tarmac at Stamu.
When Operation Deterrence of Aggression, which culminated in Assad’s downfall, began on Nov. 27, 2024, al-Douri didn’t wait for orders. He put on his flight suit and headed straight to Stamu air base, home of the 63rd Brigade, where he had last served. He expected that the days of relentless sorties would return, when helicopters never left the skies, pounding front lines all the way from Deir ez-Zor to Idlib.
During the war, Stamu had morphed from a modest helicopter pad into a launch site for numerous choppers loaded with barrel bombs. It wasn’t the only one. Such bases, from Latakia to Daraa and from Damascus to rural Aleppo, underwent the same grim transformation.
But when al-Douri arrived, he found the airfield nearly deserted. Helicopters stood scattered across the tarmac, while barrel bombs lay stockpiled in warehouses and even out in the open.
A quick exchange with a friend revealed that the base commander, Brig. Gen. Nadim al-Jurdi, had fled to an unknown destination. “Too bad for him,” al-Douri remarked. Al-Jurdi had paid 300 million Syrian pounds to buy his post in June 2023 (roughly $120,000 at the official exchange rate at the time). Still, al-Douri pressed on. He ordered the two remaining soldiers to arm his aircraft, only to be told it was already fitted with a barrel bomb, primed and ready.
He walked over to his favorite helicopter, the one he had flown often in years past. He knew its number by heart: 2816. An old Russian-made Mi-17 with a roar that seemed to rip through the sky. But when he tried to start it, nothing happened. He stared at the fuel gauge; the red light was on. Empty. He called one of the soldiers, who confirmed that there was no fuel for any of the grounded helicopters. Al-Jurdi had sold it all off, together with the airport’s security chief and the head of air force intelligence in Latakia. Convinced the war was winding down and sorties were over, they cashed in on the fuel and munitions, leaving only the barrel bombs behind.
Rage surged through him, but beneath it he sensed the truth: The end had come, the moment when years of rot had finally surfaced. He climbed down from the helicopter, cursing everything, and saw no reason to stay. He got into his BMW and drove back alone to his home in Jableh, overwhelmed by a sense of collapse — the army, the values, the very principles he had fought for, all crumbling right before him.
He watched in silence as news came of Syrian cities falling one after another to opposition forces like dominoes tipping in sequence. Until, at last, on Dec. 8, 2024, the regime itself fell.
The grieving man gathered his belongings and military papers, burning what he could. A month later, using the Iraqi ID he had kept, he slipped across the border by land into Baghdad, taking advantage of the security vacuum. He left behind his family members, who later departed for Lebanon after the school year ended.
That Iraqi ID had been an offering of friendship from a friend in a Shiite militia that had fought in Syria, back in 2018. In Baghdad, this man was his only contact, the one who arranged his meeting with the broker. And so, in the endless wait before his departure, al-Douri began to recount his life story to me, over several conversations, in person, over the phone and via messaging apps.
This is part of it.
Al-Douri barely recognizes himself when he looks in the mirror today. Before the fall of the regime, his face was full, his smile quick, his sense of humor intact. Now wrinkles have spread across his forehead, and he rarely steps outside without dark glasses to conceal the turmoil in his spirit.
He was born in 1975, in a forgotten village tucked away in the Syrian coastal mountains, the range the world knows as the Alawite mountains. He refuses to name his birthplace, fearing reprisals from Syria’s new rulers. In the 1970s, his village had no electricity, no infrastructure, only bitter winters and the persistent dream of escape. He was never a gifted student, seldom noticed by his teachers. He finished middle and high school in Jableh, and like many sons of the mountains, he went on to apply to the Military Academy in Homs. From there, he was assigned to the Air Defense College in the village of Maskanah, southeast of Homs, where, after three years of training, he graduated as an air force officer and began logging the flight hours that would carry him up the military ranks.
Until the late 1970s, when air force commander Naji Jamil held influence, only Sunni officers were permitted to fly. Jamil, a close friend of Hafez al-Assad who hails from Deir ez-Zor, insisted that young men from the coast were prone to sinus problems that made flying impossible. When Assad learned of this, he dismissed his friend on the spot. This version of events does not contradict other accounts suggesting Jamil was also plotting a coup against the elder Assad. Either way, the dismissal opened the skies to Alawite pilots.
Al-Douri’s first sortie came in the late 1990s, when he was a freshly minted first lieutenant. He remembers that cold morning as if it were yesterday: flying above Homs and its countryside, seeing the city’s contours for the first time from the air. “I saw the Orontes River flowing calmly northward, against the course of all the world’s rivers. I was happy,” he recalls.
After nearly a quarter-century of flying, he sums up his career starkly: “I came to know Syria’s cities and villages by the rooftops of their houses, from the helicopters I piloted. Today that’s no longer possible. Those cities don’t exist anymore.”
In early 2011, he rose to the rank of captain. His flight hours — a key measure of a Syrian pilot’s advancement, meticulously recorded in flight logs — had long surpassed the threshold required for promotion. That same year, the uprising broke out. No one knew where it would lead: Would Assad step aside like Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, or cling to power in denial, as his statements suggested, and unleash consequences no one imagined? It proved to be the latter, and what came next brought the country to its knees.
After the Syrian uprising broke out in March 2011, and quickly turned into armed conflict with the emergence of opposition groups that summer, the country plunged into struggle and bloodshed. Denying reality and clinging to obstinacy, the Assad regime chose to confront everyone with brutal, unconventional tools.
A former investigator with the Political Security Branch in Latakia recounts the origins of the barrel bomb: “The idea came from Major General Jamil al-Hassan. He passed it on to Bashar al-Assad during a meeting in Deir ez-Zor in the summer of 2012.”
Al-Hassan, born in the Khalidiya district of Homs, was considered uncorrupt and entrusted with Unit 739 (Special Tasks) for the protection of the first lady and the Assad family.
Where the idea first occurred to him is unknown. The former officer notes, however, that the air force intelligence headquarters in Harasta, near Damascus, was struck by Jabhat al-Nusra in the fall of 2012, in a coordinated attack using car bombs and suicide attackers. Rumors spread that al-Hassan had been killed. They were false, but the attack may have driven him toward even greater extremism against the opposition, and toward deploying barrel bombs against what he called the rebels’ “host environment.”
Another version attributes the invention to Brig. Gen. Suheil al-Hassan, aka “the Tiger,” from the village of Beit Ana near Jableh, and reportedly now in Moscow. According to this account, the idea was passed to him by the leader of the Hormas group, one of his own Idlib-based militias. Most of its fighters, volunteers from Idlib’s countryside, later cut deals with Syria’s new authority. Its commander, for instance, recently paid 300 million pounds to secure a settlement before leaving the country. This version, too, seems credible.
The idea itself was hardly new. Barrel bombs were first devised by Amichai Paglin, chief operations officer of the Zionist Irgun militia, during the 1947-48 war of ethnic cleansing in Palestine. In Syria, the weapon reappeared in mid-2012. The regime never officially acknowledged it, and sometimes its use was confused with large Russian munitions. But by the fall of 2012, activists were already documenting their deployment.
The first documented barrel bomb dropped from a Syrian helicopter was on Aug. 19, 2012, in the al-Hamidiyah neighborhood of Homs. The pilot was Maj. Gen. Imad Nafouri, from al-Nabk in the Qalamoun region. On July 28, 2025, Saudi daily Asharq Al-Awsat reported that Nafouri had been arrested in Aleppo while attempting to forge documents to flee the country.
Nafouri, a Sunni, had once been a friend of al-Douri’s. In 2015, he led a sortie against his own hometown of al-Nabk, killing six of his own cousins. Not long after, he served six months as chief of staff of the 20th Air Division. In 2019, he was promoted to major general and named director of the Air Operations Department, the most powerful office in the air force through which all operational orders passed. By 2021, he had risen to air force chief of staff.
Al-Douri’s reaction to his old friend’s downfall was blunt: “Idiot. He waited too long. He should have walked across to Iraq and hidden here.”
Why did the Syrian regime use barrel bombs?
It is not an easy question to answer. Many explanations can be offered, but the thread running through them is clear: to spread terror among Syrians and break their will to fight. When the regime began deploying barrel bombs in 2013, and after, Damascus was not suffering from a shortage of ammunition or military capacity.
Despite its proven ability to carry out precision, intelligence-led strikes against military targets, the regime continued to unleash inaccurate, unguided munitions on populated areas. And it was not alone. All the warring sides, including those now ruling Syria, resorted to the same tactic. The victims, almost always, were civilians.
Production of barrel bombs began around 2012 in facilities belonging to the state-run Military Defense Factories, set up in multiple locations across Syria for their ease of manufacture. Among them were the stove and boiler factory in Masyaf, near Hama; the 107th Brigade site in al-Bassa, near the Jableh pine forest; and Mazzeh air base, outside Damascus. These workshops were primitive but effective, situated close to key military sites of the former Syrian army.
The stoves, cylindrical tin containers, 1.5 to 2 feet tall, had once been used by soldiers for heating with diesel fuel. The boilers, of similar shape, were meant for warming water for bathing in the barracks. They were packed with explosives and fitted with jagged scraps of metal from Defense Ministry lathes, then topped with a detonator set to trigger on impact with buildings or the ground, and these crude heaters turned into massive improvised bombs.
The helicopters that dropped them were nicknamed “al-rakkasha” (“the rototiller”) by opposition fighters, after the deafening sound of their old engines. These aging, poorly maintained aircraft made every sortie feel more dangerous, adding the risk of mechanical failure to that of enemy fire. “I was more afraid of the helicopter crashing from a sudden malfunction than of being hit by a TOW missile [an anti-tank munition],” al-Douri told me. “We flew at altitudes above 2 kilometers [6,560 feet], which made the helicopters even more likely to fall.”
By mid-2017, as munitions ran scarce, al-Douri admits: “The army began using street dividers — large concrete slabs. We collected them from Hama and Masyaf. Workers in those towns were tasked with loading them onto trucks, hauling them to Hama air base to be used as substitute ammunition.”
A friend from rural Idlib corroborates the story: “One of those slabs was dropped on my family’s five-story building. It pierced from the roof all the way to the ground, splitting it in two. By sheer luck, no one was inside. But we were left with nothing.”
More grotesque still were confirmed accounts of naval anti-submarine mines being repurposed as barrel bombs. Pulled from navy stockpiles and overseen by naval officers, they were hoisted onto helicopters and dropped from the air. The reason: By mid-2015, Syria’s submarine fleet and its mine-sweepers were decommissioned, its patrol ships useless. With no vessels left to lay or clear mines, the navy’s stockpile was fed into the barrel bomb war. Each mine weighed 2,000 pounds and was packed with C-4. They were retrieved from the navy’s Saqoubin depot, escorted by a naval officer who rode in the helicopter to ready and release them.
By the end of 2013, only a handful of barrel bombs had been dropped, six or seven in total. But by 2014, the operations expanded. More pilots joined in, and helicopter sorties became routine, as each aircraft was tasked with delivering a single barrel.
Al-Douri recalls his first mission: “I remember it clearly. We took off from Blei military air base at 9 in the morning, Feb. 25, 2014. I was at the controls of a Russian-made Mi-16, with two crewmen on board.”
On that sortie, and in many that followed, he whispered a verse from the Quran: “We have not sent you, [O Muhammad], except as a mercy to all mankind.” He meant the barrel bomb. Many pilots did the same, clinging to the verse as a kind of self-reassurance, telling themselves they weren’t monsters, but warriors fighting the “rebel monsters” who had brought ruin to the country.
Across the lines, opposition fighters turned to a different verse to justify their own shelling of cities with mortars and rockets: “And you threw not, when you threw, but it was Allah who threw.” In their telling, they were only instruments of divine justice, striking at tyranny.
Al-Douri continues: “We flew 10 minutes south, toward Tafas in Daraa province, before reaching the designated coordinates. The target was a house where several terrorists were said to be meeting. The verbal order came from the base commander, with strict instructions to carry it out quickly, before the meeting ended.”
At 9:08 a.m., they were hovering above the house at an altitude of 2,600 feet. Al-Douri steadied the helicopter. His crew armed the fuse and shoved the barrel out. Two minutes later, at 9:10, a massive explosion tore through the ground below, shaking the aircraft and filling the sky with smoke. “The mission was completed successfully.”
Here, al-Douri pauses. “I never imagined I would see houses explode and collapse like that.”
He says he never followed the media reports afterward to learn the full extent of what he had done. He only knows nine people were killed. He has never seen the images of the destruction itself.
Over time, the use of these explosive barrels spread from Daraa to the Damascus countryside, to Aleppo and Homs. Between 2012 and 2018, the Syrian Network for Human Rights documented more than 11,000 barrel bombs, which killed thousands of civilians and displaced hundreds of thousands. The regime also employed a particularly cruel tactic known as the double tap: Drop one barrel, wait a few minutes, then strike the same spot again, this time hitting those who rushed in to rescue the wounded.
East Aleppo bore the worst of it. Neighborhoods like al-Bab and al-Ansari were blanketed with barrels, leaving hundreds of victims — women, children and families — crushed beneath rubble. The bombing was indiscriminate and made no distinction whatsoever between combatant and civilian. East Aleppo became a nightmare, a hellscape in every sense of the word, a place where the most savage, indiscriminate, incendiary weapons were unleashed.
On Oct. 7, 2016, the World Health Organization reported that at least 377 people had been killed in eastern Aleppo in just a few days, at the hands of Syrian and Russian forces. In the wake of such strikes, opposition groups withdrew from the city, following Turkish orders to relocate to Idlib with the launch of Operation Olive Branch in the north.
“What made barrel bombs in Aleppo even more destructive than elsewhere, is that we had to drop them from higher altitudes to avoid the MANPADS the opposition acquired after 2013,” al-Douri explains, referring to shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles. “That made the strikes more random, and deadlier for civilians.”
The image of a country reduced to rubble was horrifying. Yet amid the devastation, Syrians still found room for dark humor. A joke from Homs told of a one-eyed man who went to enlist in the Syrian army. The recruiter told him he was unfit: With only one eye, he couldn’t aim a rifle. The man replied, “I came to volunteer for the indiscriminate bombing.”
Al-Douri recalls an incident from mid-2013, when he was a lieutenant colonel: “We received intelligence that Turkey had sent a shipment of weapons to an opposition group in the town of Salqin in Idlib province. Col. Suheil al-Hassan called me and assigned me the mission of destroying the shipment before it reached them.”
At the time, al-Hassan was field commander of the air force’s special operations units. He had authority over pilots and organized the barrel-bombing campaigns. He was already one of the most prominent commanders to emerge in the war, leading major battles on multiple fronts. In late 2015, he was promoted to major general, after having earlier turned down a promotion to brigadier.
Al-Douri describes the sortie: “I took off from Hama military air base with a barrel bomb and flew toward Salqin. It was a short trip, about 10 minutes. As I neared the town, I saw a convoy of headlights moving along a side road. It was a clear night, and I had the coordinates where the weapons would be unloaded. I circled the spot from a distance, then pulled back to wait. Four minutes later, I climbed again, reached the coordinates, and dropped the barrel. The explosion was terrifying. It obliterated the cargo, the fighters, the entire warehouse. Once I was sure the mission had succeeded, I returned to base.”
Upon landing, al-Hassan was waiting. “I saluted him — ‘At your service, master!’ He hugged me and said, ‘You are my master, and my master’s master.’ Then he handed me an envelope. Inside was 50,000 Syrian pounds — about $250 at the time, four times a pilot’s monthly salary.”
Each sortie brought a reward of 25,000 to 50,000 pounds. By 2012, this system had created fierce competition among pilots eager to join missions under al-Hassan’s command, as he alone held the power to issue takeoff orders.
According to al-Douri, in 2013, Assad’s cousin and business magnate Rami Makhlouf placed a bank account containing millions of pounds at al-Hassan’s disposal. From this account, al-Hassan distributed money, huge sums compared to meager state salaries, to pilots. “One helicopter pilot even bought a Kia Cerato only from Suheil’s bonuses,” al-Douri recalls. “By the way, the pilots came from every sect in Syria.”
A week after leaving Baghdad for Moscow, al-Douri deleted the Telegram channel through which we had spoken for nearly a month. His last message was close to a confession: “I used to take off from Stamu air base, and on my way to the mission I would pass over my fiancee’s house. She would wait for me on the rooftop, watching the skies, keeping track of the flights when I carried barrels in the helicopter in 2014 and after. Fifteen minutes, that’s all it took me to be over her house, then onward to my mission with the barrels.”
He ended with words of apology: “Today, after everything that happened, there is nothing left in my heart to justify flying, or to seek comfort in this country ruined by its people, us among them. I apologize to every Syrian I killed or wounded. Even if I was not the one pressing the trigger, I was part of this machine of death. Forgive me.”
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