Syria’s war: A decade after the Syrian civil war began, memories haunt a family it tore apart

independent.ie-Seham Hamu lost her husband, son and grand-daughter on the same night in 2016 when a missile struck their home in Douma, a rebel stronghold near the Syrian capital that saw some of the fiercest fighting of the civil war.

Now, aged 74 and confined to a wheelchair because of a heart condition, she looks after her son’s four surviving children, a widowed daughter and a second daughter along with her husband and their children.

Their plight is not unusual in a country where hundreds of thousands of people have been killed during a decade of violence and millions more forced to flee their homes and settle elsewhere in Syria or abroad.

As the 10th anniversary of the start of the conflict in mid-March, 2011, approaches, Hamu just wants to forget.

“I don’t want to remember…it was too cruel,” she said of the war, a multi-sided conflict that sucked in Islamist militants, myriad rebel groups, government troops and foreign forces.