Ameer Alhalbi—AFP/Getty Images

A corpse lies behind a damaged ambulance after regime aircrafts reportedly dropped barrel bombs in the Maadi district of Aleppo on Aug. 27, 2016.

Ameer Alhalbi

I was with my friends driving in a car when suddenly the first barrel bomb was dropped on us by the Syrian government’s planes. It was 50 meters away. We got to the spot and there were many injured people. The ambulances hadn’t arrived yet. My friend, who was driving, gave aid to a person in his car and took him to the hospital. I remained with my other friend to document the massacre. Three minutes later the first ambulance arrived, and as they put an injured person on a stretcher, we heard the second barrel bomb falling from the air, onto the same place as the previous one. It was only a few meters away. The injured person was alive, but died from that second barrel bomb. A paramedic was also seriously injured as he was trying to help the others. Most of those injured on the street died and it was only by luck that my friend, who volunteers with the Syrian Civil Defense, and myself escaped death.

It was a terrifying scene. Tens of dead bodies were lying in front of us and when the second bomb fell the ambulances started arriving with the relatives of the injured, who started looking for their relatives. They were screaming and crying, weeps that were louder than any sound. The smell of death was filling the street, there were many dead people with their limbs cut off, and the Civil Defense volunteers began to deliver first aid. For many days I couldn’t clear my mind from the image of how the injured had died as the second barrel bomb fell on them, and what the street looked like as it was filled with dead bodies, and how the paramedic who was there to treat people had been treated by them in the end.

SYRIAN DESPAIR

Ameer Alhalbi