Gamar al-Deen was visiting a friend when gunmen poured into his neighbourhood on 27 April 2023. “I came back to find they were all dead,” he says. “My mother, my father, uncles, brothers, sisters. I wanted to die myself in that moment.”
Deen, a teacher, lost a dozen members of his family that day. Several of his neighbours were killed too. At his friend’s during the carnage, he saw a group of fighters strip a woman naked and then rape her in the street. “They told us, ‘This area belongs to us, not you, you are slaves,’” he says.
