July Never Leaves the Memory
Memory Retold and Witnessed
July 2025 was not just a point in time in As‑Suwayda, but a moment that left a deep mark on the memory of many of its people. The attack left human losses, displacement, absence, and experiences that still linger in the details of everyday life. Among those details, texts were born — seeking to preserve memory, not to reproduce pain, but to bear witness to it and prevent its forgetting.
Days pass, and the landscape changes, but the burn of July still smolders in memory.
Those days were not mere passing events; they were a turning point that rearranged so many details of our lives, making what came before July seem different from what followed.
Those days left deep scars that are hard to overcome — surfacing whenever the images of the martyrs return to the fore.
They are gone in body, but their presence remains alive in memory, and in the stories told by those who knew them.
Caught between the echo of those gone and the weight of memories carried by the survivors, remains the anguish of mothers still awaiting news of the disappeared — of a fate they do not know. A waiting that stretches on, offering no sufficient answers.
And in another corner of memory, a silent grief resides in the eyes of children who lost family members without fully understanding what happened.
Eyes that ask in silence, searching for a lap that is no longer there, as they grow up carrying a void older than themselves, and a fear that does not belong to childhood.
There is also the anguish of families forced to leave their homes, leaving behind memories, photographs, and laughter that once filled the space. The burning of homes was not a loss of stone alone, but a loss of life's warmth, and of the small details that gave days their meaning.
That is why memory remains the truest witness to what happened — it holds faces, names, and details, giving them a place that oblivion cannot reach.
July may pass on the calendar, but its imprint never leaves memory; it remains present in faces, in stories, and in the places that have changed forever.
The burning of homes was not a loss of stone alone, but a loss of life's warmth, and of the small details that gave days their meaning.
