There had been no sound of shelling. A dull hiss was the only warning Mohammed Zarba received. He paused outside his home in the barren street to face the noise, but his eyes immediately began to burn, as did his nose and throat. Zarba blinked rapidly to clear his blurred vision as he dragged himself into the kitchen to soak a cloth in water and place it over his face. His father Fawzi lay on the floor, panting.
“I patted him on the chest but he didn’t react,” Zarba recalled in his frugal home in Zamalka, a village in eastern Ghouta, once an embattled region held by Syria’s opposition on the outskirts of the capital, Damascus. “Then his face turned blue as he struggled to breathe. I didn’t understand what was happening,” Zarba said. “I was terrified he would start foaming at the mouth. He didn’t, otherwise he would have died.”
Zarba, now 31, was 20 when, shortly after midnight on Aug. 21, 2013, the Syrian regime attacked the Ghouta region with sarin — a nerve agent that recently deposed president Bashar al-Assad deployed against civilians on several occasions during the 13-year civil war. In a video taken at the time, Zarba can be seen convulsing on a hospital stretcher — his sweaty naked body trembling as his head sways from right to left, with his pupils rolling back into his head, almost unconscious.
“The fear of that night will never go away,” he said, watching himself gasping for air on his cellphone. “It took me almost 20 hours to regain consciousness. Then I ran home and realized that everyone in my neighborhood was dead, mostly suffocated to death in their sleep. Only me and my family survived the chemical attack.”
“I’ll never forget what Bashar al-Assad did to us,” Zarba told New Lines as we sat cross-legged on a rug in the salon of his home, sipping coffee. “He killed and poisoned his own people with sarin. … What do you call someone who did such a terrible thing? There is no other word to define him than ‘butcher.’”
For five long years, eastern Ghouta was one of the most fiercely contested areas during Syria’s grinding civil war, which erupted after Assad crushed peaceful protests during the region-wide 2011 Arab Spring. Its besieged residents grew used to gunships roaring overhead and helicopters dropping barrel bombs on the area, which remains devastated to this day, its gray facades completely crumbled onto the narrow, dusty, bumpy streets. But the night of Aug. 21, 2013, was different.
Rockets containing sarin were fired at several rebel-held suburbs in both eastern and western Ghouta, killing at least 1,144 people, while 6,000 others suffered from suffocation and respiratory issues, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR).
The SNHR said gassing people in their sleep, minimizing any chance of survival, demonstrated that the attacks were “premeditated and deliberate.”
“The weather in the region had been forecast to be relatively cool and calm between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. that night, meaning those responsible knew that the air would be still and the heavy poison gas would naturally drift downwards and settle at ground level rather than blowing away,” the rights group said in a statement at the time.
According to an extensive investigation by Human Rights Watch, which used GPS data and satellite imagery analysis, at least eight 330 mm surface-to-surface rockets hit four sites in Zamalka — al-Mahariq Street; Naher al-Tahoun Street in the Bostan area; near the Hamza Mosque; and near the Tawfiq Mosque in the al-Mazraat area.
The fear in Mohammed Barakat Khalife’s eyes is still evident. His shortness of breath and blurred vision are a permanent reminder of the day in August 2013 when a missile filled with sarin fell not far from his home. “Being awake saved me,” Khalife said, his voice faltering as he recalled the events. “Otherwise, I would have died.”
Over a decade later, the terror of that night — ambulance sirens wailing, people screaming in agony and anguish, and the sound of babies crying in the still air — is still fresh in the city’s collective memory. “I can’t forget the gasps of the people rasping with distressed breaths, the foam coming out of their mouths, the terrified look in their eyes,” Khalife told me, sitting on a pile of rubble that had once been his neighbors’ house, where one destroyed building is still sliced in half from top to bottom, its empty walls and a small visible kitchen giving the space a strange verticality. “That night, even the narrow streets were packed with bodies. It was impossible not to step over the dead. It felt like the start of the apocalypse.”
Eastern Ghouta returned to the regime’s control in 2018, with Syrian security forces intimidating anyone who spoke out about the chemical attacks. But after a sensational and rapid offensive in late 2024 by rebel forces led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Assad regime collapsed. The opposition advance began on Nov. 27, 2024, bursting out of northern Syria’s Idlib province and quickly overrunning the cities of Aleppo, Hama and Homs before taking control of the capital on Dec. 8. The dictator, who presided for 24 years over a fragile state founded on oppression, torture and murder, fled to Russia, bringing an end to his family’s iron-fisted dynasty that began under his father, Hafez al-Assad, in 1970.
Today, after decades of repression, Syrians feel they no longer live in a police state and can tell their stories freely. “If I’d spoken out before, Bashar al-Assad’s forces would have cut off my tongue,” said Umm Nabil, sitting on a plastic chair outside what’s left of her home in Zamalka. “For years, they muzzled us. Now we can finally talk.”
The 50-year-old woman lost 22 members of her family during the night of Aug. 21, 2013. She survived because she stayed on a higher floor. “No one on the ground floor came out alive,” she said. “For years, afraid of reprisal, we had to lie, saying people died from dust inhalation. But the truth is quite different. They were choked to death by sarin.”
Assad denied ever using chemical weapons, claiming variously that the attacks had never happened or that rebel groups had staged them. Yet he agreed in September 2013 to join the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) — the global chemical weapons watchdog — and give up all chemical weapons, which are banned by the Geneva Protocol and the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Although the OPCW announced the completion of its destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons on Sept. 30, 2014, investigations proved the use of sarin and chlorine by regime forces in rebel-held areas in subsequent years.
The SNHR has documented a total of 222 chemical weapon attacks in Syria since their first recorded use on Dec. 23, 2012, up until Aug. 20, 2023. “Approximately 98% of all these attacks have been carried out by Syrian regime forces, while approximately 2% were by [the Islamic State group],” the SNHR said.
The rights group estimated that about 1,514 people suffocated to death in these attacks, including 214 children and 262 women.
On the night of Aug. 21, 2013, 43-year-old paramedic Mohammad Ahmed Suleiman heard an unusual-sounding rocket at about 2 a.m. There was no explosion, just a dull roar. Shortly afterward, the dispatcher on Suleiman’s walkie-talkie said there had been a chemical attack and ordered volunteers and medics to rush to the scene to help. He wrapped his face with a piece of cloth to protect himself. As people started to move bodies and take survivors to the field hospital, another rocket carrying sarin hit the crowd.
“Death was everywhere,” Suleiman recalled. “There wasn’t a door in Zamalka that we opened without finding entire families dead. Most of them died while they were fast asleep. Others lay dead on the floor with pinpointed pupils and foam still visible around their mouths. One family of five died huddled in a bathroom, apparently seeking shelter from the gas. We did everything we could. But it wasn’t enough to save them.”
The worst, for Mohammad, was yet to come. He did not know that part of his family — his father, his brother and sister-in-law and their two children — had suffocated to death until he smashed through the front door of his family home in the early hours of the morning. The house was empty. He rushed to the nearby medical facility. At the sight of death, his legs gave out.
“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Suleiman said. “No names, just numbers, their faces screaming fear. I grabbed my younger brother’s body, he was cold as ice, his chest turned to blue, a clear sign of suffocation. He was almost unrecognizable.”
Suleiman buried them all in a mass grave in Zamalka, along with hundreds of other victims of the largest chemical weapons attack of the 21st century. At the time, some people who were still alive were mistaken for dead, until a movement of the head or the faint sound of their moaning saved them. Men went on one side, with women on the other and children in a dedicated section. “The regime didn’t even allow us to give them a decent Islamic burial,” he said.
The thirst for justice has not yet been sated for what Suleiman calls “the massacre of innocents” by Assad. “It was clearly a deliberate and criminal act. But no one gave us justice,” he said. “Assad is gone, but we want to see him on trial for what his bloodstained hands have done. Until then, our pain will not go away.”
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