Syria has expelled an Italian Jesuit priest for his outspoken criticism of the government’s crackdown on a popular uprising. The Rev. Paolo Dall’Oglio has lived in Syria for 30 years, helping to restore a 1,000-year-old monastery that became a center for Muslim and Christian understanding.

Dall’Oglio’s departure from Damascus on Saturday was sudden. More than a year ago, the government ordered him out, but a campaign on Facebook — “No to the Exile of Father Paolo” — delayed his expulsion.

When the anti-government demonstrations began last year, Dall’Oglio supported the young Syrians who risked their lives to protest peacefully.

“I am very moved by the face of many youth that have been suffering enormously to achieve their desire of freedom and dignity,” Dall’Oglio said last week from the garden of his home in Damascus as he bade farewell to friends and supporters before his expulsion. “There are so many young persons that are put in jail and tortured, just because they have expressed, nonviolently, their opinions.”

His opinions have finally landed him on the wrong side of the government.

Sectarian Friction

For three decades, he headed a Christian community in an ancient monastery he helped restore in the hills outside Damascus. He invited Muslims and Christians to pray together — and they did — in more peaceful times. But Dall’Oglio says the uprising has strained Syria’s diverse religious fabric.

The government says it protects religious minorities — the Christians, the Alawites and others — against what it says is an uprising of Muslim fundamentalists. Dall’Oglio rejects this picture as simplistic, but acknowledges the tensions.

When asked whether he thinks Christians in Syria are under threat from the uprising, Dall’Oglio is adamant that it is not the revolution that threatens them, but the conflict between the opposition and the regime, and the Alawite community.

“So there is, in some parts of Syria, in a real civil war — we know that,” he said.

Dall’Oglio also knows Syria’s minority Christians have real fears, but he says it is a generational issue. Older Christians have no experience with democracy — not in the family or in the community. Many younger Christians have joined the revolt because, he says, they believe democracy is better protection than the regime’s violence and oppression against the Muslim majority.

“Many Christian youth believe in a better world. We should pay attention to them. Something new has happened,” Dall’Oglio said. “I’ve been with Alawites for democracy, Sunnis for democracy, Christians for democracy — these people are real.”

Dangers, And Violence, Grow

They are real, he says, and in danger. When a young activist, photographer Basil Shehadi, a Christian, was killed by a sniper in the embattled city of Homs, the church in Damascus refused to hold his funeral — a sign of the divisions in the community.

Dall’Oglio arranged to hold the service at his monastery, where he says young activists — Christians, Sunnis and Alawites — mourned the loss and prayed together.

Does he have faith in this uprising now that it has entered a more violent phase?

“I am a monk, and I have taken a position with nonviolence,” he says. But, he adds, “the church I belong to believes in the right of people of self-defense. I will stay faithful to nonviolence, but I won’t be astonished that violence brings violence in reaction.”

Dall’Oglio’s departure comes as the Syrian government has launched a relentless offensive against the armed wing of the revolution. Civilians, no matter their religion, are dying every day. The priest’s supporters say the government is trying to silence a voice for religious tolerance, just as the country slides into civil war.

“It would be better for me to be dead with the martyrs of this country than to go away in exile,” Dall’Oglio says. “I have offered my life for the future of this country, and I wish to stay in full solidarity with them; so I will come back.”

But not, he fears, anytime soon.

On the first day of June, a child held up a sign during a peaceful protest in the northern village of Binnish in Syria’s Idleb province. His sign asked: “What is the meaning of childhood without freedom?” The question was followed by the opposition’s one-word demand to President Bashar Al Assad: “Leave.”

From the schoolboys of Daraa who were tortured after writing anti-regime slogans on the walls, to 13-year-old Hamza Al Khateeb, who was mutilated and tortured to death, Syrian children have been on the front lines and front pages of the revolution.

Since March 15 last year, hundreds of children have been killed, maimed, detained and tortured alongside tens of thousands of Syrian adults. However, in recent months, Syrian children have faced a more extreme and specialised brutality: close-range and systematic murder in serial massacres across the country.

Last March, in the Homs neighbourhood of Karm Al Zeitoun, two dozen children were viciously stabbed to death along with their mothers by regime-controlled shabbiha from neighbouring areas. On May 25, 49 children were killed in the village of Tal Daw in the Houla region of Homs province. Many of them were slaughtered with knives and butchered with axes. On June 7, in the tiny village of Qubair in Hama province, dozens of children were slaughtered alongside the majority of the village’s residents. Most of the bodies were stolen and the homes were torched, but the bloody traces and eerie silence lingered.

In the aftermath of these massacres, only images remain: as evidence, as witnesses and as cold, calculated messages of terror from the regime to the people.

Several significant, destructive results have emerged from these calculations.

By outsourcing the dirty work to local militias, the regime distanced itself from the monstrosity of the crimes while deceptively placing the perpetrators within the blurry category of “armed gangs”. The massacres amplified the already sectarian-charged environment as once peaceful neighbouring villages suddenly turned violent.

The massacres also left a physical vacuum in neighbourhoods and villages. Surviving families, terrified for their children, left their homes and land behind and chose to live as refugees in safer areas. These territorial gains serve the regime, carving sections of Syria into havens exclusive to Assad regime supporters. As one activist from Hama said: “They are pushing us east of the Orontes River.”

Such loaded claims seem outlandish until you map out the massacres and realise you can pinpoint the locations of future massacres in specific areas of Homs, Hama and Latakia. Another activist said: “We are 20 massacres away from an opposition-free Syrian coast.”

The recent United Nations Security Council report Children and Armed Conflict details accounts of “grave violations against children” by the Assad regime since March last year. These violations include children being among the civilians targeted by regime shells and bullets aimed at residential areas and peaceful protesters. Refugee families have been shot at while trying to flee across the borders to Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan. Children as young as eight have been threatened, interrogated and tortured. Some have also been abducted from their homes and used as human shields on regime tanks entering opposition towns.

The report also included the Free Syrian Army’s practice of recruiting people under 17 to bear arms and serve as assistants in field clinics. While these violations are deplorable, they are in no way – as some morally bankrupt pundits have suggested – equal to the violence committed by the regime.

Last spring, there was a widely spread rumour about a sectarian chant that explained the “true” intentions of the revolution: “We will send the Alawites to the grave and the Christians to Beirut.” It would be inexcusable if it were ever chanted. But it never was. This invented chant instilled fear among minorities who were warned of their future if the Assad regime falls.

Misplaced fear has led to the emergence of the “ultra-Alawites” in Homs, who call Mr Al Assad “Sunni” for being too weak and compassionate when dealing with the enemy.

As a Syrian, it is extremely difficult to hear terms like “cleansing”, “extermination”, “sectarian conflict” and “civil war”. It is even more difficult to look at children’s corpses wrapped inside bloodied blankets, lined side by side like dolls. And I wonder, who are these gruesome images for?

The regime knew these crimes would be recorded and the images would spread. The opposition’s documentation became the regime’s warning signals for the darkness ahead. After decades of “fear of the unknown” tactics, the graphic pictures are the new terror tactic of choice for the regime. If the people decide to not fear the unknown, let them fear the (horrific) known.

It is tempting to view these images as abstractions of violence. I found myself staring at the smooth white curvature of a broken skull, or the pinkish-grey twists spilling out the back of a boy’s head. But these gory details distract from a more important narrative. What was this little girl thinking before the knife pressed against the thin skin of her neck? How many times did it have to pass back and forth before it killed her screams? And what about this infant girl with her long eyelashes and gold earrings? I want to imagine her in deep, peaceful slumber, but a sharp piece of bone juts out of a deep cut along her forehead. It is from the axe that hit her tiny face without mercy. Did she feel pain? Was she frightened?

And what was the Syrian man thinking while holding the knife against the neck of a girl he knew, or wielding an axe above the head of the baby daughter of his neighbours? Did he really believe they needed to be killed so that he would survive?

The regime likes to blame Al Qaeda or unknown foreign elements for these crimes. But these are not Al Qaeda’s tactics. In fact, there are few historical precedents for systematically murdering children by hand, one by one. Far from just instilling fear, these ruthless massacres and their traces confront every Syrian with questions as devastating as the images: who are we as a people? What have we become? And how did we get here?

Mr Al Assad’s supporters may be disillusioned by his weakness. But his cold words to his disloyal dissidents in his latest speech were very clear. His actions were even clearer: You either follow us like sheep, or we will slaughter your children like sheep.

I used to feel awe at the courage of children like the boy in Binnish. They used to give me hope for the future. Maybe one day they will again. For now though, after studying the gruesome aftermath of butchered innocence, I want to tell this little boy to go home, to be safe. But the truth is, Syria’s children are not safe – not in their homes and not in the street, not in a protest and not in their sleep.

The revolutionaries made a choice to face death instead of humiliation, but the children made no such choice. They were killed in the most heinous ways imaginable so their deaths would bring ultimate humiliation to their families. The regime is gambling that their images will be weapons of future hate and instruments of irreparable sectarian tears in Syrian society.

Or their images could be reminders of what Syrians fight – a spiteful regime that is willing to kill its most innocent for absolute power. Only Syrians will decide whether they can mend what has been torn. Until then, we will continue to add images of slain children to our collective history.

Amal Hanano is the pseudonym of a Syrian-American writer. On Twitter: @amalhanano

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It has thrown students out of top-floor windows. It has shelled cities from the land and from the air. It has raped women and men and tortured children to death. Now with the massacres at Howleh and Qubair – in which Alawis from nearby villages, accompanied by the army, shelled, shot and stabbed entire families to death – the Syrian regime has escalated its strategy of sectarian provocation. Here Tony Badran explains very well the sick rationale behind these acts. To a certain extent the regime’s plan has already worked. Now it seems inevitable that sectarian revenge attacks will intensify. In general, sectarian identification is being fortified in the atmosphere of violence created by the regime and added to by the necessary armed response to the regime. Sectarian hatred will deepen so long as the regime survives to play this card.

The regime wants us to understand the conflict in purely sectarian terms. Many Syrians recognise this and are resisting it. At this impossibly difficult time it’s good to remember the Alawi revolutionaries, who are heroes, and crucial to the revolution, heroic in the way Jewish anti-Zionists are heroic. What do I mean by heroic? A disproportionate number of Alawis owe their livelihood to the regime. To fight for a post-regime future means to fight for a future in which their community will be, at best, less favoured than at present. This takes moral and political courage.

Many Alawis have grown up surrounded not, as most Syrians have, by anti-regime mutterings, but by the happy version. To break with this version requires a psychological transformation, something as big as growing up. More concretely, there are family pressures – and family is so important in Syria.

Very many Alawis are employed in the security forces. If your uncle is an officer in the mukhabarat, therefore, you don’t find it easy to publicly oppose the regime. It takes courage to do so, and the kind of confidence in your own judgment which will allow you to discount the arguments of your elders and authorities. Only a few people have such strength. (Of course it takes much more strength to live in a Sunni neighbourhood being beseiged and bombed, but this is a different kind of strength.) We should be humble when we consider the historical mistakes of others.

Most of us, whatever our background, would commit any barbarism if an authority we trusted assured us of the act’s legitimacy. This was the conclusion of the famous Milgram Experiment, whch Stanley Milgram sums up here: “Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants’] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants’] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.” The human propensity to follow even obscene orders, or to conform to the obscene perspectives of elders, does not excuse the actual torturers.

Every man’s responsibility for his own actions is a rule we must live by even if ultimately it isn’t true. Those who torture and kill must be considered guilty. I hope evidence is being stored so the killers may one day be tried under a fair justice system.

In the meantime, many are being killed, and not only Alawis. I know of a young Damascene Sunni who worked for the mukhabarat. The version I heard says he was only a driver, not a torturer. He was followed and shot thrice in the back of the head. I’ve heard about an informer, a Christian, who was killed in the western suburbs of Damascus.

The version I heard was that he wrote lists for the mukhabarat, and that the demonstrators he listed were arrested and tortured or killed. Men waited for him outside his house, kneecapped him, took him away in their van and later dumped his stabbed corpse. His mother called the local Christian families together and demanded an act of revenge. The men told her it wasn’t their business. And I’ve heard from a friend from the Qurdaha region that even there in the regime’s heartland army officers are being picked off by snipers while they drive the mountain roads.

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