Witnesses who fled across the Lebanon border tell our writer what they saw
Friday, 29 April 2011
REUTERSProtesters march through the streets of Douma
In Damascus, the posters – in their tens of thousands around the streets – read: “Anxious or calm, you must obey the law.” But pictures of President Bashar al-Assad and his father Hafez have been taken down, by the security police no less, in case they inflame Syrians.
There are thieves with steel-tipped rubber coshes on the Damascus airport road at night, and in the terminal the cops ask arriving passengers to declare iPods and laptops. In the village of Hala outside Deraa, Muslim inhabitants told their Christian neighbours to join the demonstrations against the regime – or leave.
And they are true. Syrians arriving in Lebanon are bringing the most specific details of what is going on inside their country, of Fifth Brigade soldiers fighting the armed units of Maher Assad’s Fourth Brigade outside Deraa, of random killings around Damascus by the ever-growing armed bands of Shabiha (“the mafia”) from the Alawite mountains, of massive stocking up of food. One woman has just left her mother in the capital with 10 kilos of pasta, 10 kilos of rice, five kilos of sugar, box after box of drinking water.
In Deraa – surrounded, without electricity or water or supplies – the price of bread has risen 500 per cent and men are smuggling food into the city over the fields at night.
But it is the killings which terrify the people. Are they committed by the Shabiha from the port city of Lattakia – created by the Assad family in the 70s to control smuggling and protection rackets – or by the secret police to sow a fear that might break the uprising against Assad? Or by the murderers who thrive amid anarchy and lawlessness? Three men carrying sacks of vegetables outside Damascus at night were confronted by armed men last week. They refused to stop. So they were executed.
The Syrian government is appealing to the minorities – to the Christians and the Kurds – to stay loyal to the authorities; minorities have always been safe in Syria, and many have stayed away from protests against the regime. But in the village of Hala, Christian shops are shut as their owners contemplate what are clearly sectarian demands to join in the uprising against Assad. In an attempt to rid Syria of “foreign” influence, the ministry of education has ordered a number of schools to end all English teaching – even banning the names of schools in French and English from school uniforms. Even the kindergarten where the President’s two young children are educated has been subject to the prohibitions.
There are bright lights, of course, not least among the brave men and women who are using the internet and Facebook to keep open the flow of information from Syria. The Independent can reveal that a system of committees has been set up across the cities of Syria, usually comprising only 10 or 12 friends who have known and trusted each other for years. Each of them enlists 10 of their own friends – and they persuade 10 more each – to furnish information and pictures. Many were put in touch with each other via the cyber kings of Beirut – many of them also Syrian – and thus “circles of trust” have spread at the cost of the secret police snooping that has been part of Syrian life for four decades.
Thus there now exist – in Damascus alone – “The Co-ordination of Douma”, “The Co-ordination of al-Maydan” (in the centre of the city), “The Co-ordination of Daraya”, “The Co-ordination of Harasta” and others. Some of them are trying to penetrate the mukhabarat secret police, to get the brutal cops to work for them on the grounds that – come the end of the Assad regime, if that end ever comes – they will be spared the trials and revenge punishments to come. One Beirut blogger says that several of the cops have already declared themselves for the uprising – but are unwilling to trust them in case it is a trap to discover the identity of those behind the committees.
Yet Syrians in Lebanon say that the Syrian security police – often appointed through graft rather than any technical or detective abilities – simply do not understand the technology that is being used against them. One Syrian security official sent three Facebook posts. The first said: “God, Syria and Bashar al-Assad or nothing.” The second read: “It’s the time to declare war for Allah.” The third announced: “The legacy of God on earth is an Islamic Republic.”
“The fool was obviously supporting Bashar – but then wanted to frighten people by suggesting Islamists would take over a post-Assad Syria,” one of the Syrian bloggers in Beirut says. “But he didn’t realise that we could tell at once that they all came from the same Facebook page!” The same man in Beirut found himself under interrogation by Syrian state security police several weeks ago. “He was a senior officer – but he didn’t even know what Google was.” Many of the Syrians sending information out of their country are anxious that exaggerations and rumours will damage the credibility of their reports. For this reason, they are trying to avoid dispatches which cannot be verified; that two Iranian snipers, for example, have arrived to help the security police; that one man was actually interrogated by two Iranians – a friend suspects that the cops were from the north and spoke in the Kurdish language, which the detainee misidentified as Iranian.
More serious – and true – is the report that Khaled Sid Mohand, an Algerian journalist working for France Culture and Le Monde, was arrested in Damascus on 9 April and has disappeared into a security prison. A released detainee says that he saw Mohand in Security Section 255 in Baghdad Street in the capital some days later. But this story may not be correct. Diplomats have been unable to see the missing journalist.
There are also reports that two young European women working for a Western embassy were arrested and gagged when they left a party at 3am several days ago, and only released several hours later after interrogation. “It means that there is no longer any immunity for foreigners,” a Syrian citizen said yesterday. “We heard that a North American had also been taken from his home and questioned by armed men.”
Especially intriguing – because there are many apparent witnesses of this episode – is a report that Syrian Fourth Brigade troops in Deraa dumped dozens of weapons in the main square of the city in front of the Omari mosque, telling civilians that they could take them to defend themselves. Suspecting that they were supposed to carry them in demonstrations and then be shot as “terrorists”, the people took the weapons to the nearest military base and gave them back to the soldiers.
The rumours of army defections continue, however, including splits in the Fifth Brigade at Deraa, whose commander’s name can now be confirmed as General Mohamed Saleh al-Rifai. According to Syrians arriving in Lebanon, the highways are used by hundreds of packed military trucks although the streets of most cities – including Damascus – are virtually empty at night. Shops are closing early, gunfire is often heard, checkpoints at night are often manned by armed men in civilian clothes. Darkness indeed.
Tens of thousands fill the streets of cities across Syria — and for the first time, the capital of Damascus – after weekly prayers to defy the regime of President Bashar Assad. The protests suggest that the use of extreme force has failed and perhaps outraged some on the sidelines.
Tens of thousands of Syrians poured into the streets of the capital, Damascus, and other cities after weekly prayers Friday, overcoming an official campaign of violence and intimidation to deliver a powerful message of defiance against the regime of President Bashar Assad.
For the first time since a protest movement began six weeks ago, large protests broke out in the very heart of Damascus, the Maidan district of the capital, according to witnesses reached by telephone and amateur video posted to the Internet.
“The people want the downfall of the regime!” protesters shouted as they marched with banners just southwest of the capital’s Old City.
They called for an end to a military clampdown on Dara, the southern city where the protests began.
New protests also erupted in the coastal city of Baniyas, the northwestern town of Kafr Zita, Jassem in the south and throughout the restive suburbs of the capital, according to video posted to the Internet, witness accounts and activists.
“We’re the youth revolution, not thugs or terrorists,” they chanted in the Damascus suburb of Saqba.
In Homs, the country’s third-largest city, located on the Lebanese border, activists set up live-streaming video coverage of the marching, suggesting a new level of technological know-how to overcome the regime’s restrictions on media.
The scale of the demonstrations suggested that the Syrian regime’s use of extreme force, including the deployment of tanks and the unleashing of gunfire on peaceful pro-democracy protesters, had failed to quell the uprising, and may have even outraged some who earlier were on the sidelines.
“To heaven we go, martyrs by the millions,” they chanted in Deir Azour, according to video posted online.
A witness reached in Dara said at least five people were killed in protests in the city, where the Syrian army’s 4th Armored Division, under the command of Assad’s brother Maher, has all but occupied the city.
“With our souls, with our blood we sacrifice for you, Dara,” protesters called out in the ethnic Kurdish city of Qamishli, in eastern Syria.
Syrian opposition activists had called for a nationwide “Friday of Rage” after noon prayers to protest the violent crackdown on democracy advocates.
Syrian security officials were poised to suppress any signs of civil disobedience.
“The Interior Ministry urges citizens to actively participate in boosting stability and security and helping concerned authorities carry out their duties to achieve this national goal by refraining from staging any rallies, demonstrations, or sit-ins under any title,” said a statement broadcast on Syrian state television.
Every other journalist is trying to get into Syria, but on Saturday I was trying to get out. The government had made it perfectly clear: My visa was expiring and unless I left on April 23, I would “face the full force of the law”.
I had agreed the night before with my cameraman, Ben Mitchell, over a drink that neither of us wanted to discover what “full force of the law” meant. So the debate was really whether I should fly out from Damascus or drive to Amman, Jordan, and fly from there.
The decision was made that he would fly out from Damascus, the Syrian capital, with the gear and I would drive to Amman. I had left my second passport there with a friend. One for Arab countries and the other for Israel. Welcome to 21st century diplomatic relations.
I decided to wait until after noon prayers before setting out south to the border. If the roads were going to be blocked with various pieces of burning detritus, as they had the day before, I wanted to know first. It’s about 125km from Damascus to the Jordanian border – a drive that should only take an hour or so, especially with the way Syrian drivers tend to step on the gas.
I was in a really bad mood on this particular morning as I was by default being expelled from the country. I said very little to the driver as we set out, which is unusual for me. I’ve been grilled in the old school style of journalism: I can still hear the voice of one of my mentors saying “eyes and ears Mr Perry … eyes and ears”.
The only two questions I asked my driver as we left Damascus were his name, and where he was from. “Abdel … from Daraa,” he told me.
“Beautiful city,” I responded.
Truth was: I didn’t know if it was beautiful or not. It was less than four weeks ago when I tried to access the city (which lies right against the Jordanian border in the South) and was turned back by the army. It was my first week in Syria when we tried to cover the initial protests in Daraa. I remember coming across that army checkpoint and two machine-gun positions had been “pre-sighted”.
‘Kill zone’
An old military technique that I learned from the US Marine Corps about after years in Iraq: Soldiers will simply take two posts, put them at approximately “two o’clock and ten o’clock” as your eyes would scan the horizon: a certain distance out – fire off a few rounds until you hit the post. Then mark that spot on the machine guns sightings – and just like that … you’ve got yourself a “pre-sighted kill zone”.
A kill zone. The name says it all. US marines have a particular knack for naming things that describe exactly what they really are.
I knew that day, seeing those posts and that “kill zone” that the government was taking these small demonstrations (at the time) very seriously. Syria up until these past five weeks had been a quiet country, while the rest of the region seemed to continue to burn.
Of course it became clear the day before, on April the 22nd, that the government would no longer stand for the type of dissent that had spread: clear opposition to the regime. Over a hundred people were killed across the country on a bloody Friday, the bloodiest since the protests began.
I tried to get out of the hotel and around the country as best I could throughout my month there. But as I told a colleague: “I don’t blend in really well – and this government is rounding up journalists.”
It was really that, and a few bad incidents I had come across while trying to get out and about. Be it my camera being wrested away from me outside the main mosque in Damascus or my drive through the neighbourhood of Barza in Damascus the previous week.
Barzah: A bad neighbourhood to begin with … it had gone from bad to worse the Friday I decided to drive through and take a look. Men with metal pipes were in the middle of the street beating people.
At least a dozen walking wounded were headed away from the main mosque there, some bleeding from the head; others had their hands bandaged. Clearly there had been a hand-to-hand brutal battle. Ambulances raced away from the scene – and each time I would have the driver circle back they would wave the pipes as if to say: “We dare you to get out of that car.”
Gunfire raining into crowd
My grumpy attitude, Abdel [the driver] and I were approaching the city of Izraa when something immediately clearly horrible was unfolding down the road directly in front of us. People, mostly truck drivers, were standing on the highway … yelling at the cars approaching – telling them to pull over.
Screaming and waving widely. I saw one making signs with his hands. He was mimicking the motion of a machine gun firing. I got my bearings, noticing right away two road signs: one pointing to the right that read “Izraa: 1km” and the other pointing to the left that read “Daraa”.
It dawned on me at that moment that I had been here before. We were just outside the “kill zone” I had seen weeks earlier on the outskirts of Daraa.
About 50 metres from where we pulled over was an overpass that connected Daraa to Izraa. I could see clearly a crowd of people marching from my left to my right over the bridge.
Suddenly gunfire rained into the crowd. The truck drivers dove for cover. And, for what seemed like an eternity, I sat there in the car, stunned and frozen. People were falling on top of each other, being cut down like weeds in a field by what I think must have been a mix of both small arms fire and machine gun fire. I saw at least two children shot. They fell immediately. People were screaming. Gunfire rattled on.
Two cars tried to gun it under the overpass and continue down the highway, even with the gunfire continuing to cut people up. One of the cars got hit immediately before it passed under the bridge and ended up slamming into the embankment on the right side of the road. Someone fell out of the passenger side and scrambled under the bridge and crawled into a ball … just hoping for survival, I suppose.
I’ve been playing it through over and over again in my head for the past 16 hours and I still do not know where the gunfire was coming from. It seemed to be coming from a field that lay off to my right – on the Izraa side of the bridge. I could see some muzzle flashes, but I’ve never in my life seen people walking, and just shot at indiscriminately.
I could not take my eyes off what was quickly becoming carnage. One of the last things I remember seeing clearly were people lying flat on the road, taking cover behind those who had already been wounded or shot dead … lying in what must have been pools of blood to avoid a hail of flying hot hell.
Abdel’s brain finally switched back on and he flung the car into reverse and headed backwards down the highway, laying on his car horn the entire time, weaving backwards through the cars that were now slowly approaching the spot where truck drivers were taking cover in the ditch. I was gripping the handle of the door so hard, I noticed my knuckles had gone totally white.
Mini-massacre
Abdel spun the car around, drove over the median and started driving back to Damascus. There was really nothing to say at that point. But out of immediate instinct, I rang our news desk in Doha. I can’t remember what I said initially, but clearly it was enough for the editors to get an anchor up immediately to tape an interview over the phone, getting my fresh reaction to what I had seen.
I didn’t know what to say honestly except it was clear security forces [or Assad loyalists, who are now, based on behaviour, part of the security forces] had just carried out a mini-massacre. I’m sure I repeated myself too many times, something you try not to do … but this was unlike anything I had ever seen. After covering seven separate wars in as many years, I’ve never seen people march directly into a hail of gunfire.
As the interview was rapping up, we came across a heavy army checkpoint. We had driven through maybe a dozen on our way down, and the further we headed south, the more frequent they became. It was as if around 25km north of the Jordan border there was an invisible military zone that had been put up.
I didn’t notice the ones on the other side of the highway, but as soon as we started approaching one (now driving back north), Abdel and I looked at each other. Immediately I apologised to Tony Harris [our anchor] and shoved the phone into my pocket, bringing a quick end to the interview.
Being seen talking on the phone as a journalist, right after fleeing that scene, we would have ended up in detention, there is not a doubt in my mind.
As we passed through the army checkpoint, the soldiers were smoking and laughing; looking at each other; smiling, waving us through various barriers. I can only describe it like what it felt to me: an evil grimace of enjoyment was on their faces. We were maybe, at the most, 3km from where I had just seen people cut down, bullets tearing their bodies into pieces. It was disgusting.
I turned to look at Abdel, to begin asking him a series of questions about the best way to proceed from that point on – and I saw a man of maybe 40 years old with a single tear running down his cheek. “Are you ok, habbibi,” I asked like an idiot.
“Yes … yes – but shou (what) … shou,” he repeated … what do we have? There is no humanity here anymore.”
‘No humanity left’
After a few minutes of silence and many cigarettes passed back and forth we debated the best way for me to get out of the country. We debated it all the way back to Damascus.
In the end, Abdel and I agreed: make a run for the Lebanese border now, spending another night in Damascus; overstaying my visa to face the “full force of the law” after reporting what we had both just seen was not a smart idea.
So, off to the Lebanese capital Beirut we went.
Ironic that a place where I’ve seen a war and many clashes break out before was suddenly a seven-hour refugee for me as I waited for the first flight to any European city so I could then connect home to see my elderly and sick grandfather on Easter.
As I sit at this airport in Paris, writing this piece, watching people come and go, I am haunted by two thoughts: The first is a question I cannot answer. How can you shoot people like that? Just watch a crowd march towards you; sit in a firing position, wait … watch; then fire directly into a crowd of civilians.
I did not see a single shot fired from the crowd in the few minutes we sat there watching people flail without any place to hide – a gut wrenching pink mist spraying strait in the air.
It is that thought, and the words of a young man from the southern city of Daraa speaking about the country he once loved, a country that has forever changed asking me rhetorically: “What do we have? There is no humanity here anymore.”
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