‘There is always something beautiful, despite all the pain’

Some days, when he has a good idea, when the pace of the bombing lessens and when he can find paint and brushes, Abu Malek al-Shami sets off looking for a clean space amidst the rubble of one of Syria’s most-bombed cities.

The falling roofs of bombed buildings are his canvases, “so they can be seen from the ground and from above,” he tells Syria Direct.

It is “a message to the world that we can make something beautiful out of the destruction and ruin of war.”

Abu Malek al-Shami is a street artist. His work ranges from small bits of graffiti to wall-sized murals. Al-Shami’s 32 murals are splashes of color in a lifeless landscape. His art draws on his experience as a fighter, artist and current resident of Darayya.

The 22-year-old activist-turned-fighter came to the southwest suburb of the capital from Damascus three years ago to fight with the Free Syrian Army. In 2015, he started painting.

“At first, I was afraid of how people would react to the paintings on the walls of their demolished homes,” al-Shami says. “It’s something of an emotional subject. People here have lost nearly everything, and they have a very strong connection to their homes.”

After the first painting on Darayya’s walls, “I noticed the amount of happiness and optimism it spread on the faces of the blockaded people,” he says. “It made me feel the value of my work, its positive impact.”

Darayya was one of the first Syrian cities to rise up against the regime in 2011. Protesters famously offered roses and bottled water to soldiers stationed in the city. Symbolically important to the opposition, Darayya is strategically important to the regime, located near major military installations southwest of Damascus.

Regime forces encircled Darayya in 2012 and have blockaded it and attempted to take control since then. Under a rain of daily barrel bombings, residents spend their days underground in shelters, their homes reduced to rubble above their heads.

Some murals are elegies to fallen friends. Others touch on more universal themes. In one, furnishings painted on the wall of an abandoned, demolished house are a shadow of normal life and a message of permanence. In another, a young girl, standing on a mountain of military helmets and skulls, paints the word “hope.”

“It shows that there is always something beautiful waiting for us, despite all the pain that we’re experiencing,” he says.