Death of woman on Aleppo park bench stirs anger over Syria poverty

A harrowing image showing the death of a woman on a park bench in Aleppo has gone viral on social media, highlighting the poverty and social decay Syria still faces, nine months after the ouster of the Assad regime and the dying down of conflict in most of the country.

The woman passed away while sitting on the wooden bench in the Qabaqib Park in Bustan al-Qasr area of the northern Syrian city, with no one noticing her for hours. Local sources identified her as Mariam Shahid, a former employee of the Directorate of Education, according to the Saudi-owned pan-Arab newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat.

The pan-Arab newspaper reported that she had been suffering from mental illness. She had been married and was divorced years ago, and lived with her elderly father until his death one year ago.

After her father passed away, she tried to seek refuge with her brothers in another part of the country but they refused to take her in.

She returned to Aleppo, living alone without any treatment for her condition, because her difficult financial circumstances meant that she could not obtain care or medicine.

No one provided her with any help for the short remainder of her life, and even after her death.

On the social media platform X (warning: graphic image in link), a user called Abdul Wahab wrote: "Hours went by and no one paid attention to him. Her body was a witness to a harsh reality, its tragic silence encapsulating the story of a nation ravaged by war to the point where a person’s death among the crowd became something fleeting, raising no questions and leaving no answers."

Other social media users suggested that the photograph of her should be placed in the offices of officials, ministers, and the president, so they would pledge to ensure that no one in Syria dies of hunger, cold, or poverty, and that they govern with justice.

Syria’s economy has been ravaged by 14 years of war, with an estimated 90 percent of people living in poverty by the time the Assad regime fell in December 2024, while social and family networks broke down amid the dislocation and devastation caused by the conflict.

Current President Ahmed Al-Sharaa has pledged to fight poverty, recently launching the Syrian Development Fund which aims to rebuild areas of the country devastated by war.

However, US and international sanctions have not been fully removed and questions remain regarding the new government’s financial transparency with a Reuters investigation revealing earlier this year that Sharaa had quietly put relatives in charge of key sectors of the economy.