Updated December 22, 2024 at 06:05 AM ET
Ghouta, Syria – For six years Tawfik Diab had to deny the way he watched his wife and every one of his four children die.
Then former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime crumbled and so did his government's lies.
Among the most brazen? That his forces never dropped chemical weapons on Syrian civilians despite the UN finding he did so repeatedly during the 13-year civil war sparked by peaceful demonstrations against his rule.
So, when Tawfik was sure Assad was gone he logged into Facebook and posted a picture of his children smiling for the camera. He captioned it with five words.
"Martyrs of a chemical attack."
He could finally publicly mourn his family, finally unbury the truth.
If he'd shared what happened when Assad was still in power, he said, he knew he'd be imprisoned or worse.
Syrian intelligence would call him in for questioning, he said. They'd show him pictures of his lifeless children and ask if they were his. He recalled himself telling them what they wanted to hear: "No, they're not mine."
"This is all fabricated," Tawfik remembers saying.
When Syrian state TV, Russian state TV or any foreigners showed up to interview him he said officers stood by and listened. He repeated his rehearsed story, there was no chemical attack, his family was killed by terrorists and gunmen.
But in this area on the outskirts of Damascus everyone knows what happened on April 7, 2018. It takes just a few questions to any passerby to find survivors of the toxic chlorine attack that residents here said allowed regime forces to retake the city of Douma in the district of Ghouta from rebel forces.
The signs of that years-long battle are everywhere, homes collapsed into rubble by airstrikes, a visible opening into tunnels at a central square that residents here say rebels used, a monument that's only partially standing.
Tawfik recounts what happened sitting in the living room of his brother Majd's home just above the family tire shop. The pair describe themselves as a non-political family. People who went to work, came home and raised their kids. But that didn't spare them this fate.
It was Majd who first got the call that the building where his two brothers lived with their families had been hit.
He rushed over and found: babies, mothers, fathers, children including his nine nephews and nieces, their mothers and his two brothers, suffocating. The youngest, Joury, was just 40 days old.
He shared videos he said were taken that night. The body of a little girl in a pink and white striped shirt lifeless and piled on top of other children, their cheeks unnaturally splotchy, a few foaming at the mouth.
It's hard for Tawfik to go back to the building where it all happened. But on this day he agrees to take visitors.
There are no signs of the horrors that happened here. No plaque. No place to lay flowers. No pictures. New residents have moved in like it never happened just as Assad's regime tried to claim.
Tawfik pointed to the sidewalk in front of the building and in the narrow entryway.
"This is where we were laying," he said.
That night Tawfik said he heard booms, he and his family rushed to the basement for shelter like they always did when strikes and fighting intensified thinking it would be safer. But once they noticed a strong smell of chlorine and disinfectant, they tried to get outside.
He points to the roof.
"The chemical barrel came from up there and it left a hole so the chemicals leaked into the building," he said.
He mimicked the way they all retched, the way their throats tightened.
"Right before the chemical attack a barrel bomb was dropped in this neighborhood so all the water tanks were broken," he said. "We couldn't even wash with water."
Tawfik's brother Majd tried to shake their other brother awake. Rifaat's bare skin would peel away at his touch, he said. By day's end, Rifaat, his five children and his wife were dead along with Tawfik's family and almost every resident of this building, 42 of 47 people.
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons investigated the attack that stole Tawfik's family. It found reasonable grounds that it was a helicopter from the "Tiger Forces" of Assad's Air Force that dropped two yellow cylinders of toxic chlorine gas that landed on these homes.
During Syria's civil war, chemical attacks were supposed to be a red line for global leaders. Former President Obama drew that line in 2012 and warned of "enormous consequences" that would change his calculus on military intervention.
Only a few months later Assad crossed that line with a sarin gas attack that killed hundreds of civilians. Those enormous consequences never really materialized. And Assad's forces then used chemical weapons on the Syrian people again and again and again, including the attack on Tawfik's family and neighbors.
Somehow he survived. He was hospitalized for a month and sick for much longer. Today he lives with only the memories of his children. His despair is still evident in his dark brown eyes.
He gets quiet when he thinks about his time as a dad.
In his phone he has a series of photo montages that commemorate their lives.
Pictures of Ali, Omar, Mohamed and Judy as babies, as toddlers, and little kids. In one Mohamed is smiling with a fake mustache on, just like his dad's. In another, his kids pose outside the building where they were eventually killed. Judy, his youngest, was only in first grade.
Now that Assad is gone, he said, he wants the attack that killed his family along with his brother and his brother's entire family reinvestigated.
"We want the rights of our children," he said. "Everybody who was involved must be prosecuted."
Copyright 2024 NPR
