Syria Faces Its Past and Its Future
In the field, Moises is restless and relentless, working from early morning till late at night with a professional’s calm. But his eye is unfailingly compassionate, and at times his scenes can summon the power of a religious tableau. On our trip in 2012, we visited a village outside Aleppo, where he photographed a mother mourning over the tortured body of her dead son. Her face, with empty eyes cast to the sky, summons a grief as old as time.
Boys wait for bread at a bakery in Douma, on the outskirts of Damascus. Once a bustling city, Douma has been ruined by years of combat and siege. Amid the rubble, residents struggle to rebuild their lives.
The images from our recent trip offer stark testimonials of the cost of Assad’s rule: the prematurely hardened faces of boys waiting to buy bread for their families at a bakery on Damascus’s outskirts; the ghastly visage of a murdered man whose killers had gouged out his eyes; the painfully legible despair of Majida Kaddo, whose brother-in-law, the activist Mazen al-Hamada, was detained and tortured for years, only to be killed just days before Assad’s fall.
