Sweida / July 21, 2025
“I take photos because I don’t know how to speak about my feelings.”
It used to be a personal confession, a gap between what we feel and what we can say. Today it is political. In a deliberate media war that floods screens with noise and partial narratives, the inability to express becomes a vulnerability that is exploited, and the truth of a story grows harder to hold. Tammam’s photographs carry that burden from words and turn it into evidence.
This series was shot entirely on 21 July 2025 in Sweida. The “tank turret” and “fractured glass” frames are from the main arterial road. The man carrying water is near the Thaala Roundabout. The remaining images are near the Omran Roundabout.
Burned buses, a destroyed market, glass pierced by bullets, a man carrying water, a tank turret in a civic space. These are not only scenes of destruction. They are anchors in a storm of competing narratives. Each frame fixes a time, a place, a human scale. Each frame resists the order to forget.
What these images say now
Movement and return: The burned buses near the Omran Roundabout say the routes are broken, not just the vehicles. Safe movement and stable crossings determine whether people can go home and keep life going.
Livelihoods: Two charred cars are a family economy erased in hours. Quick repairs, small grants, and tools bring back work and dignity.
Documentation and accountability: A fractured shopfront is material proof. Damage mapping, preserving image data, and open registries protect facts against disinformation.
Water and basics: Carrying water by hand is what happens when networks fail. The priority now is rehabilitating wells: fix pumps and power supply, restore chlorination, secure storage tanks, and schedule neighborhood distribution points.
Public space and safety: A tank at rest, a city that cannot rest. Civilian life returns by removing the remnants of war, clearing unexploded ordnance, and towing heavy wreckage from markets, schools, and clinics.
Publishing in the face of disinformation
We pair images with clear titles, time and place, visible context, and minimal editing. We avoid sensational crops, preserve image data when safe, and state what we do not know. In a fight over reality, accuracy is a form of care.
This work honors what was lost, documents what remains, and asks a simple question that disinformation cannot answer for us: what will it take to rebuild with dignity?
