Rule Over Ruin

OPENING SCENE

It is the night of April 7, 2018, in the Douma neighborhood of Eastern Ghouta, on the outskirts of Damascus. Syrian Civil Defense volunteers, the group known internationally as the White Helmets, are pulling people from the rubble of a building struck by barrel bombs. The air smells wrong. Workers begin coughing. Some collapse.

Inside a makeshift field hospital in a basement on Martyrs Square, medics document patients arriving with foam at the mouth, pinpoint pupils, and respiratory distress. Forty-three bodies are eventually found in two adjacent buildings on the same street. Photographs of victims, many of them children, lying on floors and across one another in a basement stairwell spread globally within hours. The images are unlike anything the Syrian war has previously produced, and the Syrian war has produced a great deal.

The Syrian government denies any chemical attack occurred and calls the images fabrications by armed groups. Russian officials describe the scene as staged by opposition groups and foreign intelligence services. Within days, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, or OPCW, dispatches investigators to Douma. Within weeks, the United States, United Kingdom, and France launch the most significant Western military action against the Syrian government since the conflict began. The strikes last roughly twelve hours and destroy three buildings. When the sun rises on April 14, Syrian military officers give press tours of the damaged facilities. The war continues exactly as before.

That gap between the horror of April 7 and the normalcy of April 14 is the central fact of this day. By 2018, the Syrian conflict has entered a phase that defies conventional categories: the regime is winning, in the sense that it is retaking territory. The country is collapsing, in the sense that it is becoming something barely recognizable as a functioning state. Understanding how those two things happen simultaneously is the task of Day 5.