09/09/12
AL-QUSAYR, Syria – The corpses rest in neat rows atop narrow wooden tables in a refrigeration locker that once held fruits and vegetables.
Abdul Rahim Haswa diligently wraps the white and green sheets around the body of 8-year-old Yousef Azahri to cover the wounds from the molten steel fragments that ripped through his body when a Syrian army shell exploded into his cement house.
Haswa then carefully arranges a shroud so it covers gashes along the sides of the boy’s ashen face.
“The families always want to see the face no matter how bad the condition,” Haswa, 61, says.
Al-Qusayr is one of the most embattled towns in the Syrian uprising against the regime of Bashar Assad, and the refusal of its rebel forces to surrender despite the overwhelming superiority of the Syrian military’s arsenal is one sign that this civil war may not end for months or even years.
The United Nations estimates that more than 20,000 people have been killed by Assad’s forces since an uprising began in March 2011. The pace of the death toll is rising, says the Local Coordination Committees of Syria, a group of Assad opponents. The committee says its activists in Syria report that 100 to 250 people were killed daily in August, and only intervention from outside the country can stop the toll.
Tucked in western Syria, al-Qusayr was once a town of about 50,000 people, mostly Sunni Muslims and a few thousand Christians. Today its streets are blocked by piles of shattered glass and chunks of cement, debris from small apartment buildings that have been blasted to bits by shells fired by forces loyal to Assad that arrived here more than a year ago.
Nearly all the families that survived the bombardment have left to find safety across the nearby border with Lebanon. But several thousand people remain in al-Qusayr, fighting or helping those that do.
Mahar Azahri, 40, expresses a widely held sentiment here: “I didn’t think the revolution would last this long. But we’re prepared for a long battle.”
The opposing forces are essentially in a stalemate. The Free Syrian Army, a rebel force made up of civilians and army defectors, controls most of the town. But Assad’s military commands the main highway running through town from Lebanon to the city of Homs, a bastion of rebel activity 16 miles to the north.
Russian-made helicopter gunships roam the air over al-Qusayr throughout the day, firing machine gun rounds. They can be seen dropping bombs that send up a plume of dust, indicating another block of buildings is destroyed.
Mortar shells slam day and night into houses, apartment buildings, shops, even mosques, sometimes 20 shells an hour. Townspeople say the army has fired shells at them as they marched in protest in the street following Friday prayers.
Recently the Free Syrian Army managed to win control of an Army base here at a hospital defended by 80 soldiers. How long they could hold the base was a question. Assad’s tanks can target much of town, and his roughly 2,500 troops here maintain checkpoints around al-Qusayr to prevent reinforcements and supplies from getting in.
The three rebel forces here amount to about 2,000 fighters, their commanders say. They seem to work together loosely but observe a strict chain of command. When one brigade commander is confident he can take over an army checkpoint he requests help from another commander to do it. Fighters are often scattered to avoid airstrikes.
In the attack on the hospital base, the rebels managed to cut off the base’s supply line, forcing the Syrian army to resupply its men from the air. Such victories are difficult to hang on to.
“Our weapons look like they’re from World War II,” says Abu Arab, 39, a former Syrian army officer who leads the 400 fighters of the al-Qusayr Brigade.
Besides a Syrian army tank captured last month, his most deadly armaments are B-10 cannons, heavy guns that can be carried from place to place, and anti-tank rifles.
“If we had the weapons we need, you wouldn’t see any helicopters above us,” he said.
Residents here say about 600 people have been killed since the start of the uprising and thousands injured. Kaseem al-Zein, a doctor who runs a field hospital in al-Qusayr, says more people with war-related injuries were brought to the hospital in August than in any other month. Seventy-two people died in the fighting in August, he said.
The floral garden behind the Jaffar Bin Aby Talib Mosque in al-Qusayr is filled with tombstones. The stones are adorned with artificial flowers and painted with the Syrian independence flag — green, white and black stripes with three red stars — a symbol of opposition and resistance to the regime.
A row of empty graves has been carved from the soil.
“We have to dig them ahead of time because we can get 10 or more at once,” Haswa says .
Like many men here, Haswa was a career soldier, serving two decades in the Syrian army before retiring. He volunteered to prepare and bury the war dead after serving 40 days in prison for demonstrating in the streets against the regime last year.
A shell destroyed his house, so now he sleeps in a room across the street from the makeshift morgue. His two wives and 13 of his 14 children left al-Qusayr six-months ago. His oldest son works as a nurse in the town’s field hospital.
Haswa keeps a spiral notebook where he records the names of townspeople killed by their government. Hadija Tommas was 3 months old when a mortar shell ended her life. The Fadhil family lost four of their men in one day — all summarily executed by the Syrian army, he says. The last name, written in black ink on the ruled page of the worn notebook is Yousef Azahri.
Yousef’s father, Mahar Azahri, said his youngest son was a top student and a conscientious reader of the Quran with an interest in computers.
“He would never sit still. He was always active, even in the house,” Azahri said.
After writing Yousef’s name in black marker on the white sheet covering his chest, Haswa stepped back so the boy’s sobbing mother, Rabah, can embrace her son for the last time.
Azahri carried his son’s body to the cemetery. A procession of men shouted, “There is but one God, Allah,” and “Mother don’t cry, your son is a martyr by God’s side.”
Rabah, a 33-year-old hairdresser, was the last to leave her son’s grave. On her knees she clung to his tombstone in the hot afternoon sun until relatives pulled her away.
“Not everyone has a heart strong enough to do this work,” Haswa says. “This is how I do my part in the revolution.”
A boy looks back while he and another boy play on a Syrian military tank, destroyed during fighting with the Rebels, in the Syrian town of Azaz, on the outskirts of Aleppo, Sunday, Sept. 2, 2012. (AP Photo/Muhammed Muheisen) 
