Updated:2024-12-11 02:52 Views:191
For more than a decade of civil war, Syrians in rebel-held areas craned their necks to look at the sky — listening and fearing the sounds of an airplane engine or the whirring blades of a helicopter.
Those sounds meant imminent danger.
People scrambled in every direction. Mothers futilely tried to shield their children. After the strikes, rescue workers and ordinary Syrians rushed to tend to the wounded and bury the dead.
The planes and helicopters — which dropped destructive barrel bombs filled with TNT and shrapnel — instilled terror. Only when the government captured an area did the airstrikes stop. But in the northwest, which remained a rebel stronghold, they continued until days ago.
On Sunday morning, for the first time in years, people who lived in fear of those bombs woke to silence in the skies.
“Always, that was our life during all those years,” said Hamid Qutaneh, a member of the White Helmets rescue group. He and the other members of the rescue team spent more than a decade responding to the aftermath of airstrikes by Syrian and Russian warplanes that were key to keeping President Bashar al-Assad in power.
Mr. Qutaneh, 30, a father of two, grew up in the northwest city of Khan Sheikhoun, which was hit by chemical weapons in 2017.
Warnings of airstrikes came in brief phrases or in one word: “The warplane has taken off.” “The warplane is flying overhead.” “Airstrike.”
Mr. Qutaneh’s own home in Khan Sheikhoun was destroyed in one of those strikes.
“You can’t imagine the joy today,” he said, adding that people for the first time were gathered in the streets in large crowds, no longer fearful that they could be targeted from the skies. “What happened is the beginning of the road to justice.”
More than 100,000 Syrians have been killed from airstrikes alone, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, a watchdog group.
“We are living a happiness that can’t be described,” Ramez Abu Farhan, 41, from the central city of Homs said after he returned home from celebrating in the city’s main square. “There is safety, there isn’t shelling; there aren’t airstrikes; there are no planes, and we are hopeful for the future.”
The city had not been hit with airstrikes for years after the Assad government regained control of it. But for years, he said, “we saw the shelling and the destruction.”
Even when planes weren’t carrying out airstrikes on his neighborhood, he said, he could hear them flying overheadlvbet, headed to drop their bombs in the countryside.