Daouda Sylla has been struggling to breathe for years. He says his lungs feel like they’re on fire, and he can’t walk 20 or 30 meters without pain. “I spend all night coughing because my lungs feel like they’re burning,” he said.

He has sought treatment at local hospitals, where he says doctors advised him to stop smoking. “But I don’t smoke, and I don’t drink either,” he said.

Sylla lives in the Conakry neighborhood of Dar Es Salam, and he believes the source of his suffering is the local trash dump, where garbage is burned in large quantities, leaving the neighborhood shrouded in toxic smoke.

The dump itself has grown so big that it dwarfs the neighborhood, rising over the horizon as seen from Dar Es Salam’s streets.

Nyan Balamoun Gobou Tokpa, a pulmonologist who works as a local health clinic, said that the pollution is bad enough that it can lead to pneumonia and even chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

“In the long term, the local population may develop bronchopulmonary cancer,” he said. The dump, he added, “is slowly killing the nearby population.”

General Mamadi Doumbouya, Guinea’s charismatic military leader who seized power in a 2021 coup, has won support by pledging to improve the country’s infrastructure.

In Conakry, many young people have rallied behind him after he repaired long-degraded neighborhood roads that had become impassable during the rainy season.

Doumbouya has also strongly promoted “Simandou 2040,” a project aimed at leveraging revenue from the country’s massive iron ore mine to drive economic and infrastructure development.

He has faced criticism for suppressing dissent and opposition, but also has support from many who are drawn to his vision of a stable and prosperous Guinea — a welcome prospect in a country long plagued by political instability and widespread poverty since independence from France.

Nana Rachel Bangoura, who lives in Dar Es Salam and serves as a representative for the Citizen Collective for a Healthy Environment in Dar Es Salam, said residents want Doumbouya to intervene.

“We demand that the general come to our aid and help us remove this dump from Dar Es Salam.

Because today, we are suffering,” she said, standing inside the dumpsite. “We are tired of living in Dar Es Salam. But we have our homes in Dar Es Salam. We cannot leave.”

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