http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/11/world/middleeast/syrian-civilians-bore-brunt-of-rebels-fury-report-says.html
By ANNE BARNARD
Published: October 11, 2013
Syria’s government placed many survivors of a reported rebel attack in Latakia and other villages in this schoolhouse. Investigators say 190 were killed. - Andrea Bruce for The New York Times
LATAKIA, Syria — Before dawn on Aug. 4, Raed Shakouhi, an olive and walnut farmer in a government-held hilltop village near the Syrian coast, just across a valley from rebel territory, was woken by gunshots and cries of “God is great.”
Mr. Shakouhi, 42, hid among nearby trees with his wife and four young children. The next day, he emerged to find his uncle shot dead, his family’s possessions stolen or destroyed, and the streets littered with bloodstains and the carcasses of farm animals, he recalled last month in an interview in the state-run shelter where he now lives. Many of his neighbors here in Latakia and in the surrounding villages, mostly members of Syria’s minority Alawite sect, fared even worse.
In a coordinated attack, numerous rebel groups fought off a small garrison of government troops and swept into the villages, killing 190 people, according to a Human Rights Watch report to be released on Friday. At least 67 of the dead appeared to have been shot or stabbed while unarmed or fleeing, including 48 women and 11 children, the report said. More than 200 civilians are still being held hostage.
“This is the first time that we have documented opposition forces actually systematically targeting civilians,” said Lama Fakih, the group’s deputy director in Beirut, Lebanon, who last month visited five of the villages, which the government had recaptured by Aug. 19. She also reviewed medical records and interviewed 19 witnesses as well as doctors, military officials and opposition members for the 113-page report.
“We have up to now not documented anything approaching this scale of abuse” by opposition fighters, Ms. Fakih said, adding that the number and methodical nature of the killings constituted a “crime against humanity.”
There have been reports of smaller-scale atrocities by rebel forces, including the videotaped execution of seven Syrian Army soldiers last year. Human Rights Watch has documented some of those attacks, as well as what it calls “egregious war crimes and crimes against humanity” by government forces, including the killing of nearly 250 people in the mostly Sunni towns of Banias and Bayda in May, and a widespread policy of detaining and torturing opposition activists.
The disclosures in the latest report cast further doubt on the effectiveness of Western efforts to isolate foreign fighters and other extremists within the rebellion and foster a command-and-control structure for the fractured opposition forces. And they seem bound to bolster the government’s strategy of convincing Syrians and world leaders that the alternative to its rule is chaos and extremism.
The groups accused of leading the Latakia operation and committing the bulk of the atrocities include the extremist, foreign-led Islamic State of Iraq and Syria — which is also engaged in armed conflict with rival rebel groups — along with the Nusra Front, Ahrar al-Sham and two other Islamist groups that include foreign fighters.
None of those cited as primary participants appear to be under the control of the Western-backed Supreme Military Council, which has struggled to show it can retake the initiative on the ground from extremists. But at least 20 groups took part in the fighting, the report says, including some affiliated with the Free Syrian Army, the loose-knit collection of mainly Syrian rebel forces the council is trying to organize.
And in a video filmed nearby during the operation, Gen. Salim Idris, who leads the military council, is seen insisting that his forces played a leading role, in statements responding to criticism from Islamist groups that his fighters were hanging back. The report said it was unclear whether forces linked to General Idris took part in the initial Aug. 4 attack, when forensic evidence suggests most of the civilians were killed. But it also said that anyone continuing to coordinate with such groups could be complicit in war crimes.
The Human Rights Watch report accuses the five leading fighting groups of crimes against humanity; names several private donors in Kuwait and other Persian Gulf countries as financiers of the operation; blames Turkey for allowing the fighters to use its territory; and calls for an arms embargo against the five groups, adding to its previous calls for such an embargo against the Syrian government.
“Unified action by the international community is really long overdue when it comes to trying to deter these abuses and violations,” Ms. Fakih said, recommending that war crimes in Syria be referred to the International Criminal Court, which could investigate all parties.
The killings increased fear among the Alawite population, Syria’s largest religious minority. Alawites in the province of Latakia said in interviews that they were being indiscriminately targeted because President Bashar al-Assad and many government leaders are Alawites. During the attacks, an Alawite shrine was damaged and its sheik killed.
The report did not find evidence that children had been cooked in pots, fetuses ripped from mothers’ bodies or women sexually mutilated, as some government supporters had contended. But it documented several witness accounts of women, children and elderly people being gunned down as they tried to flee and of the infirm being killed in their homes, as well as forensic evidence that victims had been bound, decapitated or shot at close range.
Witnesses of an Aug. 4 attack told investigators of women, children and elderly people being shot as they tried to flee. - Andrea Bruce for The New York Times
In a school in Latakia converted into a shelter for people who had fled the villages, people indicated a willingness to speak of their experiences, but government officials prevented reporters from talking to anyone except Mr. Shakouhi, saying a psychiatrist had ruled that survivors were too traumatized to discuss the events.
A doctor in Latakia, who asked not to be identified for safety reasons, said the government appeared to have kept the episode relatively quiet, a surprise given its eagerness to highlight what it identifies as opposition atrocities and its cooperation with Human Rights Watch, which said officials did not impede access or sit in on interviews. The doctor said she and other Alawites in Latakia suspected that the government wanted to avoid news reports that could provoke panic or revenge attacks against Sunnis, which could further destabilize the area, and to conceal anger among Alawites that the villages were not better defended.
The attackers used cannons, mortars, rocket launchers, armored vehicles and tanks captured from the army, routing an army post and killing 30 soldiers after two soldiers had switched sides and shot at their comrades from behind, the report said.
Fighters dressed in black or in Pakistani-style tunics then strode through villages, attacking people with seeming abandon, witnesses said.
A villager in Blouta, Basheer Shebli, told Human Rights Watch that during the attack, he heard a man outside his house say, in classical Arabic, indicating he was probably a foreigner, “Let’s kill whoever is in the house.” As Mr. Shebli fled with his wife and four children, gunfire erupted. He was shot several times, and his wife was killed, dropping their 4-year-old son, who was taken hostage.
Ghazi Ibrahim Badour of Barouda said fighters opened fire as he and his wife fled with their 10 children.
“My daughter Sefah Badour, who has a master’s in Arabic literature, and my daughter Sara, who has a degree in philosophy, were killed,” he said. Morgue photos confirmed his account of Sefah being shot in the head and Sara in the chest.
Another woman, Saada Mansour, appeared to have had her hands cut off to make it easier to steal the bracelets she often wore, one relative speculated. “They were just tin,” he said, according to the report.
In the shelter, Mr. Shakouhi said the attackers had destroyed his olive orchard, emptied barrels of olive oil from his storeroom, scattered his family pictures and smashed the lute he loved to play.
Still, he said he wanted a settlement to end the war. “If we get a compromise, it’s victory for the sake of the nation,” he said.
Asked if he could again live side by side with nearby villagers who supported the rebels, Mr. Shakouhi said he could, adding that if any of them took part in the attack, they must have been forced or brainwashed.
“Anyone who knows what Syria means, he is my brother,” he said.
Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on October 11, 2013, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Syrian Civilians, Report Says, Bore Brunt of Rebel Fury.
Commentary:
Please review the enclosed article as well as the You Tube video, illustrating for the first time a detailed and in-depth involvement of the Human Rights Watch in terms of criminal activities being perpetrated by the so-called Syrian rebels targeting Alawite Syrians and massacring them en masse. The Syrian regime has, for unbeknownst reasons, kept a lid on these acts of atrocities, recently in Latakia and around other parts of Syria where the victims are Christians, and Shia and Sunni Muslims who support Bashar el-Assad's government. The Human Rights Watch has now decided to file a case against the rebels and their accomplices with the International Criminal court.
This article cites Turkey as a partner in this crime since it provides bases, where these so-called rebels and their cruel comrades from Al-Qaida, Islamic state of Iraq in Syria (ISIS), Al-Nusra Front and others receive their training and armaments financed and furnished by Kuwait (A recent entrant in this gruesome game), Saudi Arabia and Qatar. This gang of criminals then marches ahead and commits one bloodbath after another, maiming and butchering innocent Syrian civilians while the poorly informed and gullible West, greatly influenced by the Wahhabi/Salafi instigated propaganda, not only sympathizes with these cannibals, it applauds and endorses their actions.
Agha Shaukat Jafri
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