"Abu Mohammed still remembers the smell. It usually came at dawn, as the mosques sounded the first call to prayer. By the time he sat down for breakfast, it would fill the air around his home in Tadamon, a working-class district in the south-east of Damascus. The smell was hard to define. Whenever he noticed it, Abu Mohammed felt on edge."
"Whenever the minibuses passed by, he would hear gunfire later that day. Then, overnight, that same smell. One of his daughters, who was in her early teens at the time, remembers it, too. It smelt like burning hair, she recalled. Or like a piece of meat that has been left in a pan until it melts. Nearly a decade later, in April 2022, the Guardian published a video that revealed the source of the smell."
Abu Mohammed, a retired engineer in Tadamon, Damascus, noticed a recurring mysterious smell at dawn beginning in winter 2012. The smell filled the air by breakfast and made him feel on edge. Assad regime checkpoints and soldiers patrolled the neighbourhood after the 2011 uprising, and white minibuses drove along Daboul Street. Whenever the minibuses passed, gunfire followed later that day, and the smell returned overnight. One daughter described the scent as burning hair or melting meat. A video dated April 2013 and geolocated to Tadamon later showed two men in military fatigues beside a white minibus.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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