Editor’s Note: This article was published by the blog “The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak” on March 22, 2024, and has been re-published by the Kyiv Independent with permission. To subscribe to "The Counteroffensive," click here. Aahed Bakkora will never forget the night that birds began falling out of the sky. An engineer by training, he was working for a local city council in Jobar, an area just outside Damascus, Syria. At the time, the area was controlled by Syrian opposition forces that had r