In Syria, the bitter liberation of the tortured in Ghouta

Kalashnikov shots announce the return to the promised land. In Mouadamiyat Al-Sham (Syria), on the outskirts of Damascus, you just have to listen to locate the reception committees. Little by little, rebel fighters are returning home to this town in Western Ghouta, dotted with olive trees. After years of separation, families and neighbors receive them with drums, mizmar – a kind of flute – and ululations stridulated by the women who interrupt themselves to shout to the young people of the neighborhood to stop shooting. 'air.

“I didn’t recognize my own house”cowardly Mahmoud Al-Shalabi, knife and ammunition magazines strapped to his uniform of the Syrian National Army, one of the rebel factions supported by Turkey which participated in the victorious offensive of Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTC), precipitating the fall of Bashar Al-Assad.

If his hometown has changed, Mahmoud Al-Shalabi is no longer the same either. At the start of the revolution, he was 25 years old, worked as a butcher and had never seen death with his own eyes. Today, he has a long beard, a face streaked with wrinkles and his blue eyes have taken on a serious look after nine years of exile in the rebel enclave of Idlib, constantly shelled by the Syrian regime and its Russian and Russian allies. Iranians.

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