Ever-president: Assad adorns venetian blinds in an office of the Syrian mobile phone company. Teun Voeten. All rights reserved.Content warning: this article contains some graphic imagery.
“All is arranged—do hurry, the general is expecting you now.” It had taken the government press chief, Reem Haddad, eight months to convince the Syrian army to open up to Western journalists. It was a year since we had visited Syria. A year in which, according to more or less reliable figures, 76,000 people had died—of which one quarter were civilians, among them more than 3,000 children.
Now we were back. Syria is in the fourth year of war. According to the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, there are 6.5m internally displaced people and 3m refugees abroad—more than half the pre-war population of roughly 18m.
