"Here, you start feeling like you can start all over," writes photographer Abdulmonam Eassa following his escape from Eastern Ghouta, a rebel-held region in Syria under a government offensive for weeks.
"I went into a clothes shop, I bought new clothes. I immediately threw away the ones I had been wearing. Not because they were dirty, but because they held memories I’d rather forget. Bad memories."
Abdulmonam Eassa is a photographer who has been one of the key contributors to AFP’s coverage of the Syrian government’s offensive on Eastern Ghouta.
His last weeks in the enclave were spent going from town to town as regime forces advanced, cowering in basements from shelling and air strikes, and documenting as much as he could with photos, videos and text, before finally making it out to a new life and a new beginning.
Here’s his account.