Asma’s orphanages | We call her Emma Ep5

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
Tortoise Investigates.

**Chloe Hadjimatheou** (0:11)
Oh, look, our driver Abu Wissam's got us coffee.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:14)
Shukran!

**Gary Marshall** (0:15)
Oh, I can't reach it.

**SPEAKER_5** (0:16)
There we go.

**Chloe Hadjimatheou** (0:18)
We're driving around Damascus from meetings to interviews, taking in the city. This is the slow drip, drip, drip of Arabic caffeine that you get throughout the day.

**Gary Marshall** (0:29)
I love the cardamom, it's so nice.

**Chloe Hadjimatheou** (0:32)
Right by this roundabout in the heart of town, I keep noticing this green netting covering the side of a collapsed building. It turns out it's the Ministry of Defense headquarters and the very visible aftermath of an Israeli airstrike last year. Other than that, you could almost forget that this place endured a long devastating war. There's an energy to the city.
Yes, it feels poorer and tired, changed from how it was when I was here last before the conflict. But there's also a vibrancy. This is the two Syrians I've told you about before. It's just that these days, the darker Syria isn't hidden in underground dungeons anymore. Instead, it's just three miles east into the suburbs of the capital, a short drive away. And it's not a gradual change. It hits you like a punch to the gut. It just goes on and on, Gary, and there isn't a single building. There isn't a single building, for as far as the eye can see, that hasn't been bombed. One morning, our driver takes us to a suburb called Jobar. And instead of cafes and busy markets, I'm suddenly looking at something post-apocalyptic. It's weird to finally be here and be in these towns whose names I was hearing all those years during the war. They sort of seemed like vague entities then, and now coming here, they're real places.
They're real places with real people and sort of the human cost of it all just becomes all the more stark.
Suburbs like this, Jobar, Kaboon, Tadamon, were for years controlled by rebels fighting the Assad regime. It's incredible how close they got to Damascus, to central Damascus. I just hadn't quite clocked that it was so near. The battles that went on here, they would have been within earshot of the Assad department in the upmarket Malki neighborhood, as well as the presidential palace up on the hill. Jobar was one of the last rebel strongholds near the capital to continue fighting. Eventually, the Syrian army, with the help of their Russian allies, recaptured the area in 2018 The entire population was evacuated, their belongings pillaged and stolen. Then, the state helped loot the area, taking everything of worth, even the metal from the buildings, until only the concrete shells remained. There is not one single human possession to be seen anywhere in this entire town. Almost every wall is riddled with bullet holes, and many of the floors of apartment blocks have pancaked down on top of each other. Today, Jobar is completely uninhabitable.
It's one thing to read about the Syrian war. It's another thing to stand in a suburb that's still scarred by it, and realize how little distance separated the seat of power from all this devastation. The wall wasn't somewhere else far away from Asma's bubble. It was right here on her doorstep. And the thing that I keep coming back to is that this was not an equal fight. All the different groups that were fighting Assad, none of them had air power, not a single one of them. The bombs that were falling from the sky, the helicopters and the planes, all of those belonged to Assad and his allies. It's going to take so long for Syria to recover from this.
When the regime took back control of Jobar, what was left of the 300,000 people who lived there scattered around Syria, neighboring countries, and across Europe. It's possible to trace some of them, but others are missing. It happens in war, people vanish. It's just that in Syria, there are a lot of missing people. Human rights groups have consistently cited a figure of more than 150,000 missing people. But the Syrian National Commission for Missing Persons has suggested the number could be double that. That means potentially hundreds of thousands of people whose families have no idea where they are or what happened to them, or even if they're alive or dead. Among them were lots of children. It's a horror that's hard to comprehend. And that's where Asma comes back into it. Because soon after the regime collapsed in 2024, rumors began circulating that Asma al-Assad, the First Lady herself, had been involved in the disappearing of children.
I'm Chloe Hadjimatheou, and from Tortoise Investigates and The Observer, this is We call her Emma. Episode five, Asma's Orphanages.