21 Apr 2013
At least 450 people were summarily executed in Jdaidet Al Fadhl, near Damascus. Some of the victims, including women and children and a mosque imam, were reportedly slaughtered by knives. Local Coordination Committees (LCCs) activists say 100 of those had been arrested by the regime’s forces some days earlier. The numbers are expectedly on the increase, with the regime’s forces are still roaming the area and carrying out summary execution.
The regime’s forces reportedly entered the area after anti-regime fighters withdrew from the town. It is probably the first such gruesome massacre on this scale since the Daraya massacre on August 27 last year — often referred to as bloodiest single day of carnage in the Syrian uprising, in which about 1,000 people were killed.
It is not a coincidence that the two massacres, in Daraya and Jdaidet Al Fadhl, occurred in towns close to the capital. Also, another massacre, if only on a lot smaller scale, took place on August 1, when the army went into Jdaidet Artouz and from house by house, dragged more than 20 people to the streets and killed them in a similar manner. An eyewitness, a Christian friend whose family had to leave the town the following day, said the army entered their house and then left after they found out they were Christians. The eyewitness said the tanks demolished a long line of cars while the regime’s forces were handpicking town residents from Sunni neighbourhoods and summarily executing them.
There is a lot of speculation about how the butchery took place exactly. Considering that the town is close to the capital, it is likely the regime is trying to make a point. The same happened last year when rebels tried to enter Damascus in the beginning of the summer.
In a separate gruesome episode today, a video emerged showing a number of regime’s Shabbiha (pro-regime armed militias, mostly Alawites) torturing to death two young men in Al-Tal town. The video also shows the Shabbiha putting the young men to fire. In the video, the regime forces put the hair of a man who appears to be in his late thirties to fire, then put it out by kicking his head with their boots, then hit his head with a car tyre. The two young men finally apparently die from torture. Absolutely gruesome.
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