Ameenah Sawwan was up late on Aug. 21, 2013, scrolling through Facebook on her phone, when she saw the first report that a town not far from hers had been hit by a chemical attack. She watched footage from Eastern Ghouta, then saw another post that said that her hometown, Moadamiyat al-Sham, had been hit as well. She started tapping out a reply in the comments: “This is wrong. This is fake news. I’m in Moadamiyat and we were not hit by chemicals.” Then she started hearing screams.
Sawwan and her family — 12 of them were living together at the time — ran outside, but shortly after they did, mortar shells began raining down. They didn’t know where to go next. “It felt like the sky was falling,” Sawwan says.
She made her way to a nearby field hospital — a glorified basement stocked with scavenged medical supplies — stopping along the way to run her hands over her…
