The massacres that struck the villages of northeastern Sweida last July were not merely a passing episode of military violence, but one of the most brutal incursions the governorate has witnessed since 2011.

Within just a few hours, the frontlines between General Security forces and local factions collapsed, and the accumulated tension turned into an open internal confrontation that forced thousands of civilians to flee, leaving behind their homes and memories.

Months later, despite announcements by local and governmental committees about the opening of preliminary investigations and the organization of a gradual return, the tragedy is unfolding more deeply: burned homes, bodies that have not been recovered, and entire villages that remain classified as disaster zones.

Here are the testimonies of a number of survivors, revealing how the lives of families were reduced to ashes, and how the passage of time has not eased the scale of the catastrophe but has instead exposed more of its layers.

“We Survived… but Our Home Did Not”

In the village of Radaymat al-Liwa, the military assault by General Security forces and tribal factions on July 13 felt like a page being violently turned all at once. “Abu Majd” (a pseudonym), his wife, and their two children, aged four and five, fled in their pajamas, riding their motorcycle deeper into the countryside as shells rained down on the dirt road.

The motorcycle was not just a means of transport, but a small moving home that carried the family for hours. With sorrow, Umm Majd explains: “I bought the bike as a gift for my husband after saving up its price from private tutoring. I never imagined it would become the reason we survived.”

Only months earlier, the family had finished building their two-story home after five years of continuous saving. The furniture, the new kitchen, the last unused piece of clothing, all vanished in a single night.

After being displaced, the family first took shelter in a school in the city of Shahba, then in a small room used as a storage space in a nearby village; a cramped space heavy with the feeling of loss. Abu Majd says bitterly: “We survived… but our home did not.”

From July until today, the northern villages have remained under the control of General Security groups, who have prevented residents from returning and imposed a cordon around the interior villages. Despite government statements that “return is conditional on the arrival of the documentation team,” only a limited number of people have been allowed to enter, often sporadically and at great risk.

During these months, a number of civilians have been killed or gone missing while attempting to return secretly. Local committees advised waiting “because the bodies have not yet been recovered,” and because filming and documentation operations are still unfinished.

Majd constantly asks his parents, “When will we go back home?” But his father knows that returning today is nearly impossible, and he fears even more his son’s repeated question: “Do you think they took my bicycle?”

Villages with the Smell of Death

After desperate attempts to obtain information from journalists who had entered the area, Abu Majd learned that most of the village’s homes had been burned. He hid the news from his family. He says: “They take the belongings and leave the walls… that was my hope.”

On November 12, four months after their displacement, he decided to return secretly on a swift, risky visit, driven by his promise to his son that he would search for the bicycle.

At the entrance to the village of Lahitha, a General Security checkpoint stopped him and granted him a half-hour window after searching him. “Luckily,” as he says, his phone was hidden in his underwear.

He describes the scene of his entry: “Like a horror movie… the shops and pharmacies destroyed, the trees dried out, the animals dead, and the smell of corpses everywhere.” When he passed near his uncle’s house, he found a bloodstain that had not yet been washed away: “They killed him there.”

As for his own home, it had no doors or windows. The walls were blackened, and the electrical wiring had been pulled out from inside the walls. The ruined belongings had been thrown outside. He searched through the rubble… but Majd’s bicycle was not there.

He washed some winter clothes for his children to take with him, but the checkpoint prevented him: “There are instructions… nothing is allowed to pass into Sweida.”

In the video Abu Majd recorded to document what had happened to his home, handprints appeared on one of the walls, smeared in soot, prints that resembled fingerprints at the scene of a crime.

But these traces, according to several residents, face official attempts to erase evidence of the violations. The governor of Sweida, Mustafa al-Bakkour, who is part of the transitional government’s working team, has begun repainting some of the burned homes before documentation operations were completed, according to residents’ accounts.

Ziyad (a pseudonym, 42), a member of the National Guard, says:
“For four months, every day at seven in the evening, we monitored convoys of vehicles entering the villages. At the front and the back were General Security cars flashing red and blue lights, and in between them were civilian vehicles with their headlights off. By dawn, they would return via a secondary road toward Damascus Airport.”

This “smooth” passage through checkpoints under the control of General Security, compared to the severe difficulty faced by civilians from the area in crossing those same checkpoints, reinforces suspicions of direct facilitation. Personal video clips later circulated showing individuals filming themselves while looting and setting fires.

“They Burned Him and Burned My Heart with Him”

In a testimony from the village of Lahitha, “Umm Farez” recounts her story. As she was fleeing the attack, she left her disabled son behind at home because there was no space for him in the car. He had insisted on staying: “I’m paralyzed and unarmed… they won’t harm me.”

Days later, she received news of his killing. He had been filmed burning on his bed. When the family later returned, they found the remains of his bones on the charred mattress. His devastated mother says: “I stayed by his side for twenty years… I was forced to leave him. We came back and found his bones on the bed. They burned him and burned my heart with him.”

Today, dozens of videos circulate on social media of families mourning their homes.
People appear as witnesses to an open-ended tragedy, while a sense of isolation dominates public feeling. The escalation of internal conflict has scattered positions, the official local media downplays the scale of the catastrophe, and the authorities justify what happened as a “limited security operation” that should be turned into a closed chapter. Meanwhile, residents stumble daily under the weight of the massacres and violations that have struck them.

More than 35 villages have been partially or completely destroyed, and over 190,000 people have been displaced from their homes and villages. There is currently no real capacity for reconstruction or rehabilitation, and no security guarantees for return amid the deadlock of a national political solution.

As the months pass, more stories continue to surface. It is as if the tragedy did not begin on the day of the attack, but rather with the decisions that allowed people to be left alone. The son’s bones lying on his burned bed have come to symbolize official abandonment and the continuation of the disaster.

These testimonies are not documentation of a closed past, but of a reality that is still unfolding.
The homes leveled to the ground, the bodies buried beneath the rubble, and the open questions without answers all confirm that what the northern villages of Sweida witnessed was not an isolated incident, but a tragedy whose chapters have yet to be closed and whose full truth has yet to be revealed, despite the passage of time.