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FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 2012
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DAMASCUS: Syrians hold national flags as they rally in support of President Bashar al-Assad on the first anniversary of the anti-regime revolt in Damascus yesterday.—AFP
Mutilated corpses dumped outside city of Idlib
New ‘massacre’ as Syria crisis enters 2nd year
DAMASCUS: Twenty-three mutilated corpses
were found yesterday near a Syrian protest city
seized by regime forces, monitors said, as the
regime’s bloody crackdown entered its second
year to a rising world outcry. Human rights
monitors said the victims had been blindfolded
and handcuffed before being shot dead and
their bodies dumped outside the northwestern
city of Idlib, in an apparent repeat of a similar
“massacre” in the flashpoint city of Homs last
weekend.
As the Syrian regime and the opposition
continued to trade blame for the earlier killings,
both sides organized mass demonstrations to
mark the first anniversary of the eruption of
anti-government protests in the city of Daraa,
south of the capital, which was again the scene
of deadly violence on Wednesday. “Twentythree
bodies with marks of extreme torture
were found near Mazraat Wadi Khaled, west of
the city of Idlib,” said the Syrian Observatory for
Human Rights in a statement.
It also said at least five others were killed in
raids by security forces across the province of
Idlib yesterday and that violent clashes broke
out overnight as rebels attacked army posts in
the eastern region of Deir Ezzor. On
Wednesday, 37 people were killed in violence
across Syria, 20 of them in Daraa, the Britainbased
watchdog said. Human Rights Watch yesterday
demanded an end to the “scorched earth
methods” being deployed by President Bashar
Al-Assad and that China and Russia stop blocking
UN efforts to take tough action.
“City after city, town after town, Syria’s security
forces are using their scorched earth methods
while the (UN) Security Council’s hands
remain tied by Russia and China,” HRW’s Sarah
Leah Whitson. “One year on, the Security
Council should finally stand together and send
a clear message to Assad that these attacks
should end,” said the New York-based group’s
Middle East director. Moscow and Beijing have
since October blocked two Security Council
draft resolutions on the crisis in Syria on the
grounds that they were unbalanced and aimed
at regime change.
HRW said that “accounts from witnesses
reveal significant destruction and a large number
of deaths and injuries of civilians in Syria’s
bombardment of the city of Idlib.” Syrian
activists have compiled a list of 114 civilians
killed since security forces launched their
assault on Idlib, the watchdog said. The city fell
to government forces on Tuesday night, two
weeks after the regime stormed the Baba Amr
district of Homs in central Syria, following a
month-long blitz that activists said left hundreds
dead.
Following that offensive, residents of nearby
neighborhoods reported finding the mutilated
bodies of women and children. Activists posted
video footage they said proved regime forces
were to blame. The government blamed
“armed terrorist gangs.” The Damascus government
yesterday renewed its demands for foreign
governments to leave Syrians to resolve
the crisis by themselves and loyalists held mass
demonstrations in the capital and other large
cities. State television showed tens of thousands
of people waving Syrian flags and Assad’s
portrait in cities including Damascus, the second-largest
city Aleppo and Latakia, a stronghold
of Assad’s minority Alawite community on
the Mediterranean coast. “After a whole year of
pressure on Syria, we want to make the world
hear our voice: Leave Syria in peace,” a woman
on the street told the state broadcaster. The
authorities, which have blamed the revolt on
foreign-backed “terrorist gangs,” announced a
“global march for Syria” to counter anti-regime
demonstrations being organized by the opposition
across the world.
“For the lives lost in the battle for Syria,” was
the slogan beamed across the television screen.
Last week, the Syrian Observatory gave a breakdown
of around 8,500 deaths in the past 12
months: apart from 6,200 civilians, it said the
toll included more than 1,800 members of
Assad’s security forces and more than 400
rebels. In neighboring Turkey, hundreds of
Syrian activists in a “Freedom Convoy” left from
the near city of Gaziantep for the border with
Syria to mark the one-year anniversary.
“Our goal is to put pressure in our way on
the Syrian government to stop its massacres
and its embargo on its own people,” Moayad
Skaif, one of the organisers, told AFP. France,
Syria’s former colonial ruler, acknowledged yesterday
that the situation in the country was far
too complex to be resolved by a Libya-style
armed uprising with outside support. “The
Syrian people is deeply divided and if we give
arms to a particular faction of the opposition
we could trigger a civil war between Christians,
Alawites, Sunnis and Shiites,” Foreign Minister
Alain Juppe warned. “It could become an even
bigger catastrophe than we have now.”—AFP