Doha Hassan - Videographer

The parts of Aleppo I visited in 2013 resembled that of a disheveled, upturned bowel, as did many other areas of the city which had become frontlines in the battle between the regime and anti-regime “liberation” forces. Bedrooms, living rooms, bathrooms, water and electricity networks, clothes and children’s toys, books, and strewn pieces of paper. You could see everything without even having to step foot inside the buildings. As you walked from one street to the next, you would feel as though you were invading the personal stories and daily lives of their residents, passing through their rooms and over their personal belongings scattered here and there between the rubble caused by explosions and the remnants of bombs. And all the while you would listen to the distant sounds of snipers' bullets which echoed through the streets from the other side of the city. The experience was the same throughout the country, just as it was for Syrians both inside Syria and in the diaspora. Raqqa, however, had a somewhat different story at the time. In 2013, a counter-revolution took place in the Syrian province of Raqqa after its liberation from the Syrian regime. Everything the city witnessed could be foretold from the graffiti on its walls depicting the battle between civilian rebel groups and armed militant groups, to the juxtaposition of the Independence flag and the black flag of Jihad, to the revolutionary slogans in contrast to the names of militant groups like “Jabhat al-Nusra” and “Ahrar al-Sham”. This is exactly what life was like in this liberated city. Ahmed, one of the demonstrators in Raqqa, told us that on the 4th March 2013, groups of heavily armed, masked men, stormed the city chanting, 'Our eternal leader is our master Muhammad,' and shouting the religious slogan “takbeer” in unison. He added, “At the time we were thrilled to see the moment in which members of the army and security forces were forced to flee the city, but this happiness vanished instantly once we began searching, in vain, for the Independence flag among the liberators, causing us to march towards the Dallah Roundabout chanting 'We are not Sunni, we are not Alawite, the Syrian people are united' We did not realize at the time that those who had risen to liberate our city would in fact end up being the ones to occupy it.”