---
title: "‘Unfortunately, I am still alive’: Syrian sarin gas attack horror endures 13 years on"
description: "Feeling abandoned by the world, with no hint of justice, for the people in Ghouta and Khan Sheikhoun, left to endure lifelong injuries and trauma, Bashar al-Assad’s ferocious attacks have never ended."
type: "NewsArticle"
publisher: "Daily Maverick"
site: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za"
section: "PHOTO ESSAY"
author: "Susan Schulman"
author_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/author/susan-schulman/"
canonical_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2026-08-21-unfortunately-i-am-still-alive-syrian-sarin-gas-attack-horror-endures-13-years-on/"
published: "2026-08-21T00:47:53"
updated: "2026-08-21T01:42:25"
lang: "en-ZA"
word_count: 2432
---

# ‘Unfortunately, I am still alive’: Syrian sarin gas attack horror endures 13 years on

> Feeling abandoned by the world, with no hint of justice, for the people in Ghouta and Khan Sheikhoun, left to endure lifelong injuries and trauma, Bashar al-Assad’s ferocious attacks have never ended.

By Susan Schulman · Published 21 August 2026, 02:47 SAST · Updated 21 August 2026, 03:42 SAST

## Key points
- On 21 August 2013 sarin rockets struck Eastern Ghouta — estimates of the dead range from about 1,429 to 1,700 — and the assaults, including Khan Sheikhoun in 2017, left a legacy of chemical violence and near-total impunity.
- Nebras was born by caesarean hours after the Ghouta gas attack; now almost 13, he is severely developmentally disabled and has never received specialist follow‑up or explanation for his condition.
- Survivors still live amid pancaked buildings and shattered streets: chronic breathing problems, seizures, sight loss, crippling fatigue and PTSD are routine, while medical care, rehabilitation and psychological support are almost nonexistent.
- When Assad fled in December 2024 investigators found hidden chemical stockpiles and 18 arrests followed — but no trials yet and victims remain sidelined; families ask not only for prosecutions but for treatment and truth. Read the full report for the human stories behind the headlines.

## Content

Nebras darts from room to room, a phone clutched in both hands, his eyes fixed on the screen. He is smiling. He doesn’t look up, doesn’t slow, doesn’t speak. He is almost 13, and he was born on the morning Syria was gassed.

His mother, Rodina Abdulhadi (37), was scheduled to have a caesarean section that day. She and husband Mohammed Mnfak (47) spent the night by a Damascus highway, afraid that checkpoints would stop her reaching the hospital. At two in the morning, the rockets fell on the sleeping suburbs of Ghouta. There was no explosion, only a smell moving through the dark. By four, Rodina couldn’t breathe. Nebras was delivered a few hours later. The nurses didn’t bring him to her, and no one told her why.

He never settled. At three months, doctors found his thyroid was failing. His first birthday passed while other babies learnt to walk and talk and he did not. “I watched the other children,” Rodina says. “They understood people. He was not doing any of those things.” He is almost 13 now – minimally verbal, unable to be left on his own, with the understanding of a six-year-old.

Doctors say a mother starved of oxygen can pass that harm to the baby she is carrying. No one has yet examined whether that is what happened to Nebras. “I cannot separate what happened to him,” Rodina says, “from what happened that night.”

### Forgotten victims

In the early hours of 21 August 2013, forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad fired sarin into the opposition districts of Zamalka, Ein Tarma and Jobar in Eastern Ghouta, Syria. The US put the death toll at 1,429, among them 426 children. Others have put the figure over 1,700. For more than a decade no one answered for that night. Assad denied it, shielded the men responsible, and used sarin again – at Khan Sheikhoun in 2017, and in at least 10 more attacks recorded by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

![Oped-Schulman-after Sarin](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/GNh-LAYnQ3lr0pRCI-tps-aLr8E=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/Nebraswithhisfamilyathome564_889953.jpg)

*Mohammed and Rodina in the doorway of their apartment in Jobar. (Photo: Susan Schulman)*

When he fled the country in December 2024, that began to change. Investigators for the new government have since found hidden stocks of chemical weapons and arrested 18 suspects. None has yet stood trial.

The case being assembled concerns the weapons and the men behind them. The victims are not part of it. They became evidence of a chemical attack. Then they were forgotten.

But for them the attack has never ended.

![Oped-Schulman-after Sarin](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/8QRtvztQakUJ2shbLKVo9V-TwXg=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/MohamedSuleiman403_975636.jpg)

*Mohammed Suliaiman Abo Alkair in Zamalka, Syria. (Photo: Susan Schulman)*

![Oped-Schulman-after Sarin](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/TbiOTuDU1zfzlGT8Zr8rya1nKGI=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/MohamedSuleiman402_910859.jpg)

*Mohammed Suliaiman Abo Alkair in the stairwell of the family’s apartment in Zamalka. (Photo: Susan Schulman)*

### Life among the ruins

Assad followed up the sarin attacks with a ferocious assault with conventional weapons which destroyed the entire area. Today, pancaked concrete slabs, twisted rebar and mounds of rubble line the deserted streets of East Ghouta. The skeletal remains of buildings, their windows reduced to blackened voids, stand in silence. A fountain, once the traditional heart of a Syrian home, remains intact amid the destruction – a reminder of better days, when these streets were filled with life.

Yet an occasional line of laundry fluttering from the balcony of a shattered building hints at lives slowly being carved out among the ruins.

The stairwell leading to the apartment where Rodina and Mohammed live with their children is choked with debris and illuminated by sunlight pouring through bombed-out gaps. They are the only residents left in the heavily damaged building and the only family still living in the neighborhood.

Inside, the apartment is immaculate. The furniture is carefully arranged, the floors spotless. A crack left by the earthquake runs down one wall.

![Oped-Schulman-after Sarin](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/e9t42FvTrLDek4yHsqcHf9bLEeI=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/HthmMnfakreactstothedestructionofhishomeinJo500bar_423698.jpg)

*Hythm Hanim looks at his destroyed home in Jobar in June 2026. (Photo: Susan Schulman)*

Rodina returned to Jobar 15 days after the birth, still recovering from surgery, Nebras crying in her arms. “The whole place was empty,” she says. “There was no life. No people.” They began asking after the people they had known. “We would ask about someone, and they would say, ‘He is dead’. Then someone else, and they would say, ‘He is dead too’. After a while we became afraid to ask.”

Nebras will be 13 on the 13th anniversary of the attack. He has never received help, or specialist follow-up for his condition.

Desperate, the family encouraged their eldest son to travel through Libya to Europe, hoping he might be able to help Nebras obtain treatment abroad.

“When I sent him, I felt I was sending my son to death,” Rodina says. “But it seemed the only choice.”

He reached Europe but has not been able to secure help for his brother. Now, he does not want to return to Syria, a place he associates with horror, blood and violence. Rodina does not know when she will see him again.

![Oped-Schulman-after Sarin](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/rPWSQ8rV07iupBAhGVImfZjDH-c=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/NebrassonofRodinaandMohammed538_123837.jpg)

*Rodina and Nebras in the doorway of their apartment in Jobar. (Photo: Susan Schulman)*

Mohammed wants those responsible imprisoned. But justice, he says, must also mean treatment for children like Nebras and help for the families left alone with the consequences.

Nobody has offered them either.

She starts to cry.

“I only want my children around me. That is enough for me.”

### ‘Our whole lives died’

“Unfortunately, I am still alive,” Mohammed Suliaiman Abo Alkair (38) says as he walks through Zamalka. Once a thriving residential area, today it is in ruins. “Imagine,” he says. “All your friends, everyone around you. Whole families. Children playing outside. All of them dead. Our whole lives died. And then you find yourself alone.”

He points to the small green grove of trees where the first sarin rocket landed metres from his apartment. He doesn’t know why he and his family survived. No one else anywhere near did – except one young boy, the lone survivor of his family. His own father was laid out among the bodies until someone saw his finger move.

![Oped-Schulman-after Sarin](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/J_j0sCEd8fK3jj03kS8ZoFhGw6M=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/MohamedSuleimananddaughterRitaj6_299032.jpg)

*Mohammed Suliaiman Abo Alkair and his daughter Rita in the living room of their apartment in Zamalka. (Photo: Susan Schulman)*

![Oped-Schulman-after Sarin](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/5lqEWSicBrvcV-OP6zII45Hg73s=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/MohammedSuliemansdaughterRitaj405_171117.jpg)

*Rita in her family’s apartment in Zamalka. (Photo: Susan Schulman)*

“I walk around every day, and all I see are dead bodies – my relatives, my friends, my neighbours,” Mohammed says. “I wish I’d never come back to this house. The memories never fade.”

He turns into the doorway of a building sandwiched between slabs of concrete and rubble and walks up the broken stairwell into the apartment he is repairing.

Assad followed the sarin attacks that night with a ferocious assault with conventional weapons. A fresh concrete patch hovers on the wall above his head as he sits on the couch. Barrel bomb, he explains.

His wife, Naeema Ashoush, brings coffee and sits beside him. She walks with a slight limp, the result of nerve and neurological damage sustained that night, injuries that have left her severely fatigued and frequently short of breath, and nothing like the energetic 18-year-old she was then.

That night, she was eight months’ pregnant, with her infant son, Siraj, asleep beside her, when a sound she had never heard before woke her.

“Like an old washing machine,” she says. Then came the smell of rotten fruit, the choking, her sight clouding over. Siraj too was struggling to breathe. She pulled him against her chest to protect him, and he clawed at her hands, fighting to get free.

Afterwards he began having frequent convulsions – his eyes rolling back, his body turning blue and then limp. “Like dead,” she says. “Like a piece of wood.” In time it became clear his eyes had been damaged too.

![Oped-Schulman-after Sarin](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/yFaMHNIIEk2VRftJ1dCwwFLgdR8=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/LandminewarningJobar_143698.jpg)

*Signs warn about the presence of landmines in the destroyed, sarin-gassed suburbs of Damascus in June 2026. (Photo: Susan Schulman)*

He is almost 13 now. The seizures still come, though less often. His sight is severely impaired. He can play football for only a few minutes before he has to stop for breath, and then he watches the other boys carry on without him.

The physical injuries are clear – but its deepest effects are buried inside them.

“Our voices changed. We changed,” she says. “You can’t tolerate anyone saying even a word. Always upset. Always tense. Always this trembling – like a shaking that comes over you.”

Her nails are digging into her hands. Mohammed is staring off into the distance. The sound of TV drifts in from the next room.

“My mind knows there is no bombing,” she continues. “But we’ve absorbed it. It’s tied to my subconscious, my memory. There’s always fear.”

Mohammed and Naeema never sleep at the same time. They take the nights in shifts.

“One person stays awake while the other sleeps, out of fear it might happen again,” she says. “We keep watching, listening, waiting for something we can’t even name.”

She laughs bitterly.

“How much sweeter were the air strikes. At least you knew a plane was overhead. But this – what is it?”

### ‘People survived and stayed injured’

A few months ago, Samah Mahmoud Al-Bassar (43) tried to end her life. “People think that is strange,” she says. “But what is normal? Someone watches their family die. Lives through chemical attacks. And people expect them to be normal?”

On the night of the attack, she woke to her four-year-old asking for water. She gathered her children into the bathroom and poured water over them, trying to wash away whatever hung in the air. Then they all began to choke. Her uncle and four of his children were already dead. Her eyes clouded over. Half-blind, she carried three of her own – a six-week-old, a two-year-old and the four-year-old – into the street and followed the shapes she could no longer make out. “It was like being in a coffin,” she says.

Thirteen years on, daylight brings on splitting headaches, and a short walk exhausts her and leaves her short of breath. She is haunted by nightmares, and sometimes it all comes back to her, as if it’s happening again. Earlier this year her oxygen dropped, her vision blurred, and she was back in that night – the smell, the suffocation, the terror. “My body remembers,” she says. She cleans houses to keep her children in school, and keeps her own despair hidden from her children. She holds out a black plastic bag overflowing with medications she takes.

![Oped-Schulman-after Sarin](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/NUaDJa2gD-k1kCFOvC6UATPVhTA=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/medicinesforSamahMahmoudAl-Bassar423_432666.jpg)

*Samah Mahmoud Al-Bassar’s medications. I could hear voices and I tried to see. It was like being in a coffin.*

Even more painful for her than her own symptoms are the health issues her eldest son, Ghaith, now 16, suffers, which are severe enough to curtail normal activity. When he runs his lips turn blue. His hands shake. He suffers tremors, is quickly exhausted and out of breath. He notices.

“Why can’t I study like my brothers,” he asks her. “Why can’t I play like other children?”

She has no answer.

“People think if someone survived, then they recovered,” she says. “No. People survived and stayed injured. People survived and stayed afraid.” She pauses. “People survived and then had to live. That is harder.”

### ‘I was angry’

These days, survivors who need help call Rafat Yassir Abboudia.

Rafat, now 30, was standing at his front door in Khan Sheikhoun on 4 April 2017 when a Sukhoi aircraft came low over the town, dropped its load, circled and returned.

The sarin struck a neighbourhood about a kilometre away. People carried those who had been poisoned to a medical point. Others went back for those lying in the streets.

Then the aircraft returned and bombed the rescuers.

![Oped-Schulman-after Sarin](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/SQmKbYuPyDSzK-vuC1YNcbrFDvQ=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/RafatYassirAbboudia416_347272.jpg)

*Rafat Yassir Abboudia in a Damascus hotel in June 2026. (Photo: Susan Schulman)*

Khan Sheikhoun came four years after Ghouta: after Barack Obama’s red line, after the agreement intended to remove Syria’s chemical arsenal, after the world declared that the weapons were being dealt with.

Rafat, then 20, woke in a hospital corridor among people screaming, his chest seizing.

“I was angry,” he says. “The international community did not act.”

Much of his family did not survive. “The hardest moment was when a relative asked me to reassure him about his family,” he says. “I knew they were all dead. There were no words.”

![Oped-Schulman-after Sarin](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/-rOITJ4B3bfNz1lBRuOUZa7v5z8=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/Kimouwee-Chemweapon-cemeteryZamalka458_888353.jpg)

*The Kimouwee (chemical weapon) cemetery in Zamalka in June 2026. (Photo: Susan Schulman)*

Today, working through the Justice for Victims Association, he records testimony and gathers evidence for prosecution, while supporting victims and pushing the authorities to reckon with what sarin does across a lifetime. But most of those who call him are looking for something more immediate: a doctor, treatment, help for the terror haunting their lives.

Rafat understands. His physical injuries eased in the weeks after the attack. The trauma did not. He can’t return to Khan Sheikhoun.

“Every time I remember the massacre,” he says, “I feel like it happened just now.”

### ‘Are the blood of Syrians just water?’

At the edge of Zamalka, where the ruins run to the horizon, stands a cemetery the survivors call the Kimouwee – the chemical-weapons cemetery. Black balloons are painted along its walls, limp bodies hanging beneath them, imprinted with the yellow symbol for chemical danger. A chart lists the dead of that night, each by name and age. Someone has written, in English: Don’t Suffocate Truth.

For the survivors, the trial and punishment of the men responsible is not a formality. It will help give them a measure of peace. The arrests are welcome, as far as they go. But beneath them runs a deep anger – at Barack Obama and the red line he drew and did not enforce; at an international community that neither stopped the attack nor helped afterwards; at the years that have passed with no convictions, no punishments, nothing at all. And still no one has counted their injuries, or investigated them, or treated them, and not everyone has even fully admitted they are real.

“Is it possible that the United Nations, the European countries, the United States would leave Iran, Russia, and this bankrupt regime and until now nobody is held accountable?” Mohammed Suleiman says. “As if nothing happened? Are Syrian lives worth nothing? Are the blood of Syrians just water?”

“We’ve been abandoned,” Mohammed says, staring into the distance. “At moments now, we say: I wish it had ended. I wish we had died and been done with all of this.” He draws a breath. “And now, honestly, I’m sitting here in 2026 asking: why have I remained alive until now?” **DM**

*Susan Schulman (@susanschulman23) is an award-winning video, photo and print journalist.*