Inside Madaya, the Syrian town Assad starved to death

Madaya has the clean, crisp air you’d expect from a resort town.

Mountain ridges peer over the buildings, so everyone can view the landscape wherever they stand. Its beauty is what made it so dangerous.

“There were snipers on all the mountains. They shot anything that went outside,” says Musab Abed.

“They killed my father in the street in 2015.”

Abed, 20, was a child when the Syrian army and Hezbollah laid siege to Madaya between 2015 and 2017.

For 21 long months, barely a morsel was allowed to enter the rebel-held town, where 40,000 people were effectively held prisoner. Dozens starved to death, including many children.

Sieges in Syria were common during the war. An estimated 2.5 million Syrians endured one at some point. But Madaya’s was perhaps the most brutal.

Bashar al-Assad’s military encircled the town and neighbouring Zabadani. It laid mines and positioned snipers to ensure anyone trying to leave or get food from outside was killed or maimed.

“Once Hezbollah came and took control of the siege, it got even worse,” says Abed.

“Previously, we could buy food off the soldiers, but then nothing at all was allowed in.”

A cup of rice for a car

Now Assad has been toppled, Madaya can speak freely about what it endured. Syrians tell Middle East Eye of being forced to eat dogs from the street, then their own pets.

Any weeds poking out of crags were consumed. The town was stripped of anything green in the hunt for nutrition. People traded a car for a cup of rice.

Amneh Namus, 34, raised two small children under siege. She tried to soothe the pains of starvation with promises that God would set them free.

“My husband was killed by a sniper, so I told them if we die, then we will join him and they will see their father again,” she says.

“But sometimes words could not help.”

When bread ran out, Namus began using oats. Soon, they were gone, too, so she spoon-fed her children sugar.

She mixed spices with water, though that seemed to make their faces swell and discolour their skin.

By the end, she was heating up bones, softening them to make them edible for small, sensitive stomachs.

While Madaya was starving, supporters of Hezbollah posted mocking images on social media of themselves enjoying meals. Namus was too hungry to care.

“At that point, nothing that anyone did could make us feel worse,” she recalls.

‘Everyone just looked like bones’

The Syrians of Madaya were driven out of their minds by hunger.

Residents recall one man who took his children out to the street to be shot by snipers so he could end their suffering. Some people resorted to eating soiled nappies.

Sleiman, a doctor who preferred to be identified only by his first name, describes a town populated by ghosts.

‘One of the most painful things was that there was no milk for babies. I saw a man who gave his children calcium supplements instead and they overdosed’

– Sleiman, a doctor

“Everyone just looked like bones,” he says.

“One of the most painful things was that there was no milk for babies. I saw a man who gave his children calcium supplements instead and they overdosed.”

A relative of Namus began to live off a diet of tree leaves. When the UN managed to negotiate an aid delivery, his stomach couldn’t process the food.

“He screamed in agony for a week. We could have saved him with some simple surgery, but we didn’t have the tools, so he died,” Sleiman says.

Eventually, the siege was broken. Qatar and Iran negotiated a deal in April 2017 that saw rebels and civilians in Madaya and Zabadani traded for residents of two Shia towns in the north, Foua and Kefraya.

Fighters and their families boarded green buses and were taken to opposition-held Idlib province.

Those who stayed found themselves living under the authority of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which was one of Assad’s most significant backers.

Husein Sbehia, 50, remembers aid suddenly flooding into the town and having fatal consequences.

“Lots of people ate too much, and after such a long time, it shocked their bodies and killed them,” he says.

Rais Ahmed al-Maleh, a 36-year-old rebel fighter, boarded one of those green buses north, leaving much of his family behind.

“It was heartbreaking, but I didn’t have any choice,” he says.

Two weeks ago, he was in Hama, part of the rebel force that was waging a shock offensive on Assad’s government, when he heard the president had fled Syria.

Maleh headed straight for Madaya and surprised his parents by appearing on their doorstep. After seven years, he was back in his mother’s arms.

“It was like a dream. They had no idea I was coming.”