The cleansing of Zabadani

“To those who analyze the revolution theoretically, head to the battle sites and turn your words into actions.”
Al-Zabadani 18/06/2013

The town of Zabadani lies some 50 kilometers from Damascus, close to the Lebanese border in south-western Syria. Nestled between green mountains, it was once a popular tourist resort for Damascenes escaping the capital’s stifling summer heat. In 2011 Zabadani became a centre of resistance to Assadist fascism. Today the town is being pulverized and its people driven from their homes.

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Remembering the Ghouta massacre

Two years ago the Syrian regime dropped Sarin gas on multiple locations across the eastern and western Ghouta, an agricultural, industrial and residential district on the outskirts of Damascus. It was the deadliest use of chemical weapons since the Iran-Iraq war, the greatest single poisoning of civilians since Saddam Hussain’s slaughter of the Kurds at Halabja. More than 1,400 people choked to death in the attack – so many because people were sheltering from the artillery barrage in their basements, the worst place to be, where the gas sank and thickened.