| Quiet Killing!
The killing and the dying continue away from the cameras.
Sunday funerals in Homs went peacefully, in sharp contrasts to the earlier funerals on Saturday which left 11 dead. But overnight security forces raided several neighborhoods and made dozens of arrests. Reports of army crackdown and casualties continue to pour in from different Deraa communities, including: Deraa City, Nawa, Jassem, Saida and Khirbet Ghazaleh, among others.
You think you’re getting the entire story about the going-ons in Syria in a timely fashion, but you’re not. You think that our YouTubes and our stats are giving you an actual reflection of the realities on the ground, but they are not. We, the activists, the bloggers, the dissidents, are not even close in exposing the realities on the ground, despite our best effort. If anything, and over the last few weeks, we have not been accurate. We may have thought that things are somehow manageable, that the situation is not as bad as it was in Libya before the intervention, but the situation is actually far worse. The official death toll according to the estimates of human rights organizations in Syria is now above 1,000. The fact that the real figures are much higher is not the problem here. It’s the cold blooded way in which massacres are perpetrated, and the fact that the Syrian people are watching and rather than feeling scared and intimidated, they are getting more and more angry. Indeed, this is not 1982. Hama rules and tactics are backfiring. This does not augur well for the future. The international community needs to assume a more proactive role here in order to prevent conflict, rather than wait until such time when the best that it can do is manage it.
We hope this recently acquired video give an idea of just how bad the situation has been, and continues to be. this recently uploaded video shows an incident from April. 5 residents were killed as they tried to smuggle food into the besieged city. They were all shot in the head. Their brains are scattered on the ground. Soldiers make fun of the scene. One says; “This is the brain of this pig.” Then, he points to the other and says “Look at this dog.” Then he shows the bags full of, not bullets and weapons, but canned food. This was the crime for which these five young men were killed. These were not Salafi infiltrators, or armed gang members, just people carrying food for their besieged relatives. Are these the kind of “mistakes” Bashar Assad was so willing to acknowledge and to dismiss? Truly he is a reformer. When will the international community wake up and realize that we are dealing with mass murders here? Tidbits & Highlights:
Eyewitnesses report a massacre in the Deraa community of Saida where army troops opened fire randomly at crowds of protesters on Saturday May 21, killing 9 people and wounding dozens.
The residents of Jassem, another Deraa community now under military siege, the residents are finding new ways to express themselves freely in face of army tanks and snipers strewn all over the city streets and rooftops respectively. Every evening, the residents launch balloons into the air have written on them slogans like “We will never give up” and “Give us freedom or martyrdom.” Then residents laugh as army troops and snipers open fire on the balloons.
According to eyewitness reports, a young man in his late teens from the town of Mayadeen in Deir Ezzor Governorate set himself on fire on Saturday shortly after his release from detention, where he spent 10 days for taking part in an earlier demonstration. The young man, his relatives say, was severely tortured and abused during his detention.
According to eyewitnesses, the family of another martyr from Mayadeen refused a financial compensation of 500,000 Syrian pound (appx. US$10,000) offered by the authorities who insisted on having them appear on Syrian TV to accuse Salafi gangs for killing their son as a pre-condition. The parents insist that security officers were responsible for murdering their son. |
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