Hundreds turn out for rare protest in southern Syria
February 11, 2022
More than 300 people have taken to the streets to protest the Assad regime after the government cut subsidies. Protesters in the Druze city of Sweida called for "a democratic state."
Most people in Syria live in poverty, some in Sweida, the city seen here, protested for 'dignity and rights'Image: Ammar Safarjalani/Xinhua/picture alliance
Advertisement
In a rare show of defiance in a government-held area, more than 300 people turned out in the southern Syrian city of Sweida on Friday to block streets and squares for the fifth day of protests against the regime of dictator Bashar al-Assad.
The protests were sparked by a recent government decision to remove about 600,000 families from subsidy programs. Those families cut off lost access to lower-priced food and oil, triggering protests in a country where 90% of the population is poor.
"We want a civil, just and democratic state," one young man said before a cheering crowd.
An elderly man bemoaned price hikes, saying: "We cannot live or get our rights. We don't have any gas or diesel. We want to live in a homeland that guarantees our dignity and our rights."
Local media outlets broadcast images of people hoisting Druze flags — the religious minority is based in the region — despite the arrival of security forces from Damascus. Media outlets reported most people at the demonstrations were first-time protesters desperate for a better life and in want of democracy.
Sweida was also the scene of smaller protests over similar issues in 2020.
Syrian photographers document a decade of war
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has compiled moving documents of contemporary history with a collection of images by Syrian photographers who have recorded daily life in the ongoing war.
Image: Bassam Khabieh/OCHA
Searching for memories in the rubble of Raqqa
A woman pushes a stroller through the destroyed landscape of Raqqa in this photograph from 2019. "I was shocked by what happened to my city, in which I have memories in every street," the photographer Abood Hamam says. "They destroyed everything connected to our past and memory with our life in the city, every detail that used to connect me to it. It was so painful."
Image: Abood Hamam/OCHA
A photograph of unending mourning
Brothers embrace after losing their mother in Idlib in 2020. Photographer Ghaith Alsayed, who was 17 when the war began and lost his brother in a bomb attack. "Every time I had to cover an airstrike, it took me back to the day when my brother Amer was killed by the missiles that bombed our city," Alsayed says. "The same scene keeps repeating itself," he adds.
Image: Ghaith Alsayed/OCHA
Lost in the destruction
In this 2020 photo from Mohannad Zayat, a woman and her child shelter in a destroyed Binish school. "When the war in Syria began, I was a high school student, and I never expected myself to be a journalist and photographer," Zayat says. "Over the past years, I have been able to transmit many humanitarian stories worldwide, which gives me the motivation and strength to continue my work," he adds.
Image: Mohannad Zayat/OCHA
Precious water pools in craters made by bombs
In 2013, this Aleppo boy drinks water from a destroyed pipe out of a bomb crater. "Some people wrote comments criticizing the unreality of the image, and saying that the photographer should have provided clean water to the child instead of exploiting his image," Muzaffar Salman says. "I believe that any change of reality begins with seeing it as it is and not as we would like it to be," he adds.
Image: Muzaffar Salman/OCHA
Residents leave the city of Ghoula
A man pulls his child in a suitcase as a family flees the city of Ghoula in March 2018. "The war has not only changed Syria, but it has also changed our way of seeing and the way we photograph in order to share humanitarian messages with the world," the photographer Omar Sanadiki says. "My dream is that one day, even after 50 years, my daughters, Asli and Zoya, will show my pictures to the world."
Image: Omar Sanadiki/OCHA
A cup of coffee in Douma
A woman and her husband drink coffee at their home in Douma, on the outskirts of the capital, Damascus, in 2017. "Umm Mohammed was one of the most special people I met," photographer Sameer Al-Doumy says. "She got badly injured and just as she was recovering, her husband was hit by an airstrike and lost his ability to walk. ... Her love for her husband was evident and greater than anything."
Image: Sameer Al-Doumy/OCHA/AFP
A woman mourns her son in the Daraa region
"On many occasions, I couldn't photograph what I saw because of the volume of pain and oppression in front of me," Mohamad Abazeed says. "When I photographed this woman, who was visiting the grave of her son on the first day of Eid al-Fitr in 2017, she was crying and kissing the grave. And I was crying with her and wiping my tears to be able to hold myself together and take the photo."
Image: Mohamad Abazeed/OCHA
The child who lost her leg in a mortar attack
Five-year-old Aya waits for her father to fix dinner in Damascus in December 2013. She was on her way to school when she was hit by a mortar. "I was wearing my brown shoes," Aya told the photographer Carole Alfarah. "The shoe just flew and my leg flew with it. My leg has gone."
Image: Carole Alfarah/OCHA
A makeshift parkour course
In Kafr Nouran, near Aleppo, parkour athletes make constructive use of destroyed buildings in September 2020. Anas Alkharboutli's work shows the ways in which life has continued in various ways in the rubble.
Image: Anas Alkharboutli/OCHA/picture alliance/dpa
A new chance near Idlib?
"I took this photo in 2020 in the town of Balyun, south of Idlib, of a family returning home after the ceasefire agreement," the photographer Ali Haj Suleiman says. "I had mixed feelings of sadness and joy at the same time. Joy, because I saw people returning to their homes and they were happy, but at the same time I felt sadness because, myself, I could not go back to my village and home."
Image: Ali Haj Suleiman/OCHA
10 images1 | 10
The Druze have refused to be drawn into conflict, and Sweida has been largely spared in Syria's 11-year war, facing and repelling sporadic jihadi attacks. Still, like the rest of the country, the area has struggled to come to grips with the economic crisis worsened by Western sanctions, rampant inflation, a plummeting currency and the coronavirus pandemic.
Locals have said they are angered by the corruption and growing inequality they have witnessed under Assad, chanting "we want to live in dignity," while carrying placards reading "there is nothing left for the poor."
Syrian state media have not reported on the protests.
