Thursday, May 31, 2012

WORLD_ Syria dispatch: fear and hate in the killing zone of Houla

Syria dispatch: fear and hate in the killing zone of Houla

The eight vehicle convoy of UN land cruisers and Red Crescent ambulances headed down the one mile straight road towards Houla past ruined buildings towards the dead horse that lies rotting at a roundabout.

 

Syrian refugees take part in a demonstration against Syria's President Bashar al-Assad outside Syrian embassy in Amman Photo: Reuters

By Alex Thomson,
Houla 9:02PM BST 30 May 2012

This macabre sight, along with an abandoned Syrian tank marked the beginning of rebel-held Houla. For a few hundred feet there was no sign of life and then quite suddenly the convoy was stopped in its tracks by a crowd that appeared from nowhere.

Women and girls joined in with the men chanting “Allahu Akbar” and “Assad, we will cut your throat” with the appropriate gesture of the finger across the throat.

I have scarcely witnessed such extraordinary scenes of people desperate to tell the world what they have been through. We were passed from family to family, house to house, by people, sometimes literally fighting to get their story to the wider world.

All norms of Muslim culture seemed forgotten as we were shown to Riya’s bed. A hauntingly beautiful 15-year-old girl was suddenly, gently rolled on to her side to expose a large dressing where a bullet had exited her abdomen. There are countless such stories. Everybody points to a group of Shia and Alawite villages to the west and east of town. Places like Kabu and Fullah which you can see clearly from the town centre. Everyone you meet says the killers came from these villages to attack the Sunni people of Houla.

They all say that the killers had written a local Shia slogan on their foreheads as they went about their business, shooting and hacking the families of Houla to death. One man spoke for many when he said: “When this is over and this is settled and we are victorious, we will kill them. We will slaughter them and we will slaughter their children. We hate them.”


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There is also agreement here that more bodies will be discovered. The UN commandeered a flatbed truck – they clearly believed it too. The problem, everybnody here says, is that the unrecovered bodies lie close to the Syrian army positions and nobody dares venture into the killing zone of Houla’s silent no-mans-land.

The burning question is this: if these militia were nothing to do with the government, as President Bashar al-Assad says, how is it 100 men were able to enter a zone where there had been intensive shelling, commit a massacre over several hours, and not be in danger from a single shell, rocket, or mortar?

* Alex Thomson is Chief Correspondent for Channel 4 News. He is the first British journalist to enter Houla since Friday's massacre. For Alex's reports from Syria, watch Channel 4 News at 7pm.



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