Mohammed Drimi made a hundred steps in an empty shell. Ruins of his house on the edge of Maarat al-Nouman, in northwestern Syria, does not emanate any perfume of victory. Since the fall of Bashar al-Assad, on December 8, 2024, this resident moved by the war has returned several times to the scene of his childhood. Everything is unrecognizable, as pulverized by a meteorite.
In the orchard below the family home, the pistachio and the olive trees have disappeared. “They were not cut, but torn off so that they do not grow back. Some were perhaps 100 years old. After having moved us by force, the regime wanted to take us to the dream of being able to go home ”This former carpet manufacturer is lamented by leafing through textbooks, charred in the middle of the rubble.
In 2019, the city of Maarat al-Nouman received the wrath of the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Pampered by its Iranian and Russian allies, the loyalist army then resumes by fire the rebel pockets along the M5 motorway, which connects Damascus to Aleppo, shifting by force, with great blows of explosive barrels, hundreds of thousands of civilians towards the last insurgent enclave of Idlib, in the north of the country.
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