Inside Madaya, the Syrian town Assad starved to death

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Bashar al-Assad’s military encircled the town and neighbouring Zabadani. It laid mines and positioned snipers to ensure anyone trying to leave or get food from outside was killed or maimed.

“Once Hezbollah came and took control of the siege, it got even worse,” says Abed.

“Previously, we could buy food off the soldiers, but then nothing at all was allowed in.”

A cup of rice for a car

Now Assad has been toppled, Madaya can speak freely about what it endured. Syrians tell Middle East Eye of being forced to eat dogs from the street, then their own pets.

Any weeds poking out of crags were consumed. The town was stripped of anything green in the hunt for nutrition. People traded a car for a cup of rice.

Amneh Namus, 34, raised two small children under siege. She tried to soothe the pains of starvation with promises that God would set them free.

“My husband was killed by a sniper, so I told them if we die, then we will join him and they will see their father again,” she says.

“But sometimes words could not help.”

When bread ran out, Namus began using oats. Soon, they were gone, too, so she spoon-fed her children sugar.

She mixed spices with water, though that seemed to make their faces swell and discolour their skin.

By the end, she was heating up bones, softening them to make them edible for small, sensitive stomachs.

While Madaya was starving, supporters of Hezbollah posted mocking images on social media of themselves enjoying meals. Namus was too hungry to care.

“At that point, nothing that anyone did could make us feel worse,” she recalls.

'Everyone just looked like bones'

The Syrians of Madaya were driven out of their minds by hunger.

Residents recall one man who took his children out to the street to be shot by snipers so he could end their suffering. Some people resorted to eating soiled nappies.

Sleiman, a doctor who preferred to be identified only by his first name, describes a town populated by ghosts.

'One of the most painful things was that there was no milk for babies. I saw a man who gave his children calcium supplements instead and they overdosed'

- Sleiman, a doctor

“Everyone just looked like bones,” he says.

“One of the most painful things was that there was no milk for babies. I saw a man who gave his children calcium supplements instead and they overdosed.”

A relative of Namus began to live off a diet of tree leaves. When the UN managed to negotiate an aid delivery, his stomach couldn’t process the food.

“He screamed in agony for a week. We could have saved him with some simple surgery, but we didn’t have the tools, so he died,” Sleiman says.

Eventually, the siege was broken. Qatar and Iran negotiated a deal in April 2017 that saw rebels and civilians in Madaya and Zabadani traded for residents of two Shia towns in the north, Foua and Kefraya.

Fighters and their families boarded green buses and were taken to opposition-held Idlib province.

Those who stayed found themselves living under the authority of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which was one of Assad’s most significant backers.