The Woman Who Took Up Arms and Saved Lives in Bashar’s Killing Field

She was bombed, shot at, and threatened with torture and death. Yet for years as Syria’s civil war raged, Umm Mohammed put her life on the line to save others at a makeshift clinic in southern Damascus.  

She had no formal medical training, but from 2011 to 2018, as locals arrived carrying the wounded, she did her best to keep them alive. Relentless regime bombings during this time severed limbs, ruptured abdomens, and smashed skulls. She learned to treat gunshot wounds and how to sooth injuries from beatings and torture.

For years she was unable to speak out about what she saw during this time. She says people would arrive at her clinic with their hands, fingers, or ears cut off by regime soldiers. Some had their tongue cut out, or their eyes destroyed. Children would be murdered in cold blood. 

“I was a teacher before,” she told More to Her Story, “I ended up looking after so many here I was known by everyone. I became the mother of the war.”

Umm Mohammed in her house in Tadamon, Syria, on December 22, 2024. / Emre Çaylak for More to Her Story

When civil war broke out in Syria in 2011, Umm Mohammed’s home, the Tadamon suburb of southern Damascus, quickly became a frontline between regime and rebel forces. The Syrian army regained control of the area in 2018, but the violence persisted with brutal force. Umm Mohammed left Tadamon and moved to the rebel-held areas in the North of Syria in 2018, but the civilians who remained in Tadamon were subjected to extrajudicial executions, rape, torture, kidnappings and forced disappearance right up until the end of last year, when a lightning rebel offensive toppled Bashar al-Assad in early December. The power shift finally exposed evidence of his regime’s horrific rights violations.

A Human Rights Watch report released just after Assad’s fall described Tadamon as a "mass crime scene,” and urged the transitional Syrian authorities to secure and preserve physical evidence. The area is a bombed-out wasteland, strewn with the grim remnants of regime atrocities. Children pick human bones from the rubble, bloodied clothes, and even nooses lie on the floor. There are char marks where locals say soldiers used to burn bodies.

Almost 300 people were killed in a single 2013 massacre, with investigators likely to uncover more atrocities in the coming years and months. In February, the new authorities in Damascus arrested three men they claim were involved in the massacre, leading one, Monzer al-Jazairi, through the streets of the neighbourhood with his hands bound. He reportedly told his arresters that the death toll was more like 500. "We used to bring detainees arrested at checkpoints, put them under the buildings here and execute them, and then after we’re done, explode the buildings over them,” he told the Associated Press.

Under its new leadership, led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Syria has been tracking down and arresting remnants of the former government and military across the country. Years after the worst massacres and mass disappearances, it has given many hope that they will be investigated and punished. Silenced by fear for more than a decade, survivors like Umm Mohammed are finally able to tell their stories. Hers is not just one of horror, but of the extraordinary resistance of everyday people and the quiet strength of women that powered Syria’s struggle for freedom.
The clinic began in her spare room in 2011. When her home was hit with explosives in 2012, Umm Mohammed and her small team used their family gold to expand into larger premises. They operated in secret – treating rebels as well as civilians.

“There were so many dying, so many injured, I had to do something,” she says. “They would probably kill us if we were caught.” 

The clinic was hit multiple times, including with a cluster bomb, but Umm Mohammed and her team said they always found ways to keep working. They buried unrecognizable bodies and victims of mass killings — one time, it was an entire family of 13. All had their hands tied. 
When a nephew was injured, Umm Mohammed also took up arms, joining his small group of rebels with a Kalashnikova and a handgun. Almost 14 years of war reshaped lives, forcing women into roles they had never anticipated. 

She took part in daring operations, transporting bullets and hiding rebels from the regime in the clinic’s water tank. She would go to places even young men thought were too dangerous. Was she afraid? “Is there a human who is not afraid?” she said. 

Wounded by tank fire and various explosions, she also survived a sniper shot to the shoulder. 

Families look at photographs of missing people taped to the wall of Sadnaya Prison in Damascus, Syria on December 19, 2024. / Emre Çaylak for More to Her Story

Her descriptions of how people survived during those years are harrowing. During the worst years of the siege there was no bread or rice, “so we ate cats and dogs,” she said. She says some of her friends died of starvation. Medical supplies for the clinic had to be smuggled in, and that meant paying extortionate bribes.

The war also split her family. She sent her then 21-year old son to another part of Damascus for safety in 2011, and didn’t see him again until after the regime fell.  On her phone is a video of their reunion on a street of bombed-out shells of houses, Umm Mohammed falling to the ground wailing with relief and emotion. 

One of her brothers is still missing, another is dead. Her nephew refused to serve in the regime army and was sent to the notorious Sednaya prison, returning a year later covered in the scars of the torture he’d endured. After his release he spent years fighting for rebels. Last month, he was part of the advance that finally unseated al-Assad.

As Syria now faces the challenge of reconstruction, international bodies have stressed the importance of empowering women in the process. The United Nations has highlighted that women's involvement is essential for rebuilding a stable society. Syrian women’s resilience, shaped by years of conflict, has not only been about survival, but also about finding ways to adapt and contribute to their communities. 

From 2018 until when the regime fell last December, Umm Mohammad had been living in tents and dilapidated buildings in the northwest city of Azaz. Now she has returned to Tadamon and wants to rebuild – her family, her home and Syria’s future. 

Her house is in ruins, there are no windows, no electricity and part of the walls are destroyed.  She sleeps in the cold, under blankets branded by the UN refugee agency. Yet her resolve remains unbroken. 

“Every day is like a wedding day for us now,” she said. “We don’t sleep, we just celebrate and think about how much there is to do.”