Since it’s the first time he’s been able to openly discuss what happened to his family in Douma, a suburb of Damascus in the Eastern Ghouta, in 2018, Tawfiq Diam is distraught.
“Bashar al-Assad’s army would have severed my tongue if I had previously spoken out. My throat would have been cut by them. We were not permitted to discuss it,” he claims.
On April 7, 2018, Tawfiq’s wife and his four children—Joudy, Mohammed, Ali, and Qamar—all between the ages of eight and twelve were killed in a chemical assault.
In a report last year, the international watchdog Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) stated that it thought a Syrian air force helicopter took off from the neighboring Dumayr air base just after 19:00.
