At least 79 Syrian men and teenage boys, each with a single bullet hole to the head, have been found dead in a river in Aleppo in the biggest mass execution of the country’s two-year civil war.
By Ruth Sherlock, Bustan al-Qasr, Aleppo
6:54PM GMT 29 Jan 2013
Some of the bodies had been so recently killed that blood still flowed from their wounds. Others had clearly lain stagnant in the water for days, their bodies bloated and the skin disintegrating and grey.
The hands of each had been roughly tied with string or wire. Each had circular wound in their forehead or eye. The large exit wounds at the backs of their heads suggested they had been shot at close range.
Family members arrived in their hundreds to identify missing sons, saying many had disappeared after crossing from rebel-held territory in Aleppo into regime areas on the other side of the river.
It was impossible to be certain who was responsible for their deaths. But those identified, at least half the total by nightfall, were from rebel-held districts, and locals blamed government checkpoints on the other side of the river.
Families of the dead men and boys found in a stagnant canal in Aleppo search for their missing relations in a schoolyard (Alseeio Romenzi)
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These are my sons,” said Abu Mohammed, 73, as he shuffled towards the corpses laid out in rows in a schoolyard. A relative held his arm, as he stared at the exposed faces of the victims.
His legs buckled as he recognised the two young men, no older than 30 as his sons. They had travelled to central Aleppo, which is still in the hands of the Syrian government 20 days before.
“They thought they had nothing to fear from the government, so they went to renew their identity cards. But they didn’t come back. Now I have found them here.” The toll was at least 79, according to The Daily Telegraph’s count, the worst for any single find of victims summarily executed in Syrian violence chaos. There have been larger tolls but in more random rampages through villages, such as that of Houla, near Homs, last June.
Most of them were young men, some dressed in military fatigues, and others in civilian clothes. The corpses of two young boys, no older than 11 and 15, were among the dead.
They were pulled from a narrow, filthy strip of the Oweq River at a point where it edges on Aleppo’s rebel-held district of Bustan al-Qasr. The regime front line lay visible just a few hundred metres away on the other side of the water.
“We saw the first bodies at 8am in the morning, and we started to take them away,” said one local resident, who did not want to be named.
During the past month, the river had becoming a dumping ground for corpses, local residents said. Two bodies were pulled out last week. Unclaimed and without identity cards, the bloated corpses were left in the flower patch in front of one of the rebel hospital in case a passer-by should recognize them.
Tuesday’s discovery was on a different scale. Mamnoud Hassoun, 26, a rebel fighter, said there were still at least 30 bodies floating in the stagnant water further upstream, but it had become too dangerous to reach them: “It is hard to get the bodies because they are in the view of government snipers,” he said. “When the snipers saw there were Free Syrian Army pulling out the bodies they started shooting.”
Pick-up trucks, the Syrian revolution’s hearses, lined the road outside the school. Male relatives surrounded one that already contained its body, crying and angrily firing Kalashnikovs into the air.
Residents said that there had been an attempt by the government to reclaim Bustan al-Qasr the day before, and that in the fight rebels had killed several soldiers.
“When this happened, the loyalist militias that have formed checkpoints on the government side started arresting people whose identity cards showed they were from liberated areas,” said one, Wael Ibrahim, 30. “It is clear they were not being kept in a prison because they still have their belts on their clothes and these are removed usually before people are put in jail.”
Regime sources blamed the rebels for the deaths, saying those killed had been "abducted by terrorists" and that their relatives had been trying to negotiate their release. But that was not the story told by the relatives choosing the bodies for burial.
“I hope that Bashar al-Assad and all his family are killed in the same way, and that they go missing like dogs,” screamed one old woman, from the crowd.
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