A woman in a burqa picks up the severed head of a plastic doll: «My youngest son is very impressionable. He saw executions in public squares. People being strangled, beheaded or shot.» She describes her son holding a knife, and cutting the doll’s head off. He told her: «I’m cutting the same way they are cutting.» The family lives in Duma, close to Damascus. The town was held by the Jaish Al Islam radical militia for over three years until the Syrian Army liberated it in April 2018. The insurgents may have left, but the very young who witnessed, and even had to take part in, atrocities may never be free of the inhumanity they encountered.
