Mahmoud, a 21-year-old Palestinian resident of Syria, rests in a field hospital after he was found, Aug. 6, 2012, having been blindfolded, beaten and sprayed with bullets. (AP)

07/08/2012

(AP) ANADAN, Syria — The guards pulled him from his cell before dawn on Monday, bound his hands, blindfolded him and drove him to an empty lot in the Syrian city of Aleppo. They sat him in a row with 10 other captives, he said, then cocked their guns and opened fire.

“They sprayed us,” recalled 21-year-old Mahmoud, the lone survivor of the latest mass killing of Syria’s civil war. “The first bullet hit my chest, then one hit my foot, then my head. As soon as my head got hit, I thought, `I’m dead.”’

Reports of such killings have surfaced frequently during the 17 months of deadly violence that activists seeking to topple President Bashar Assad say has killed more than 19,000 people. But details are usually scarce — no more than activist reports or amateur videos of bloodied bodies or mass graves posted on YouTube.

Mahmoud related his grisly ordeal to The Associated Press hours after it happened. Struggling to speak, he lay in a bed in a makeshift rebel-run field hospital set up in a wedding hall in this town 13 miles north of Aleppo. Bandages covered his foot, head and chest. Plastic vines and colored lights adorned the walls of the darkened building, and two red velvet chairs once used by brides and grooms sat on a small stage.

Mahmoud gave only his first name to protect his family who still live in the area.

While his story could not be independently confirmed, Mahmoud’s wounds matched his story and residents who found him and his dead colleagues corroborated certain details.

Together, they painted a picture of the summary slaying of 10 men, at least some of whom had only loose links to the armed rebels seeking to topple the regime. That story jibes with activist claims of the increasingly brutal tactics regime forces are using to try to crush the rebellion that has spread to Aleppo, Syria’s largest city.

Syria’s uprising started in March 2011 with peaceful protests calling for political reforms that were met with a fierce regime crackdown. Government brutality grew as dissent spread, and many in the opposition took up arms as the conflict morphed into a civil war.

Aleppo has been a stronghold of government support throughout the uprising, with a wealthy business class and many minority communities who fear they’ll suffer if Assad falls. Until recently, the city of some 4 million people had been spared the violence that has ravaged other Syrian cities.

But during the last two weeks, rebels have been pushing into Aleppo’s neighborhoods, clashing with security forces and torching police stations in a push to “liberate” the city. Syrian media has vowed the army is gearing up for a “decisive battle,” while anti-regime activists have reported swelling numbers of troops and tanks on the city’s edges.

The Syrian government blames the uprising on armed gangs and terrorists backed by foreign powers that seek to weaken Syria.

Mahmoud receives treatment in a field hospital after he was found Aug. 6, 2012, with three gunshot wounds in the town of Anadan

 (Credit: AP)

It was amid these tensions that Mahmoud, a Palestinian resident of Aleppo, had his fateful brush with Syrian security. On Thursday, Mahmoud said, he and a friend went to collect their paychecks from the thread factory where they work and heard clashes nearby. Soon eight men in civilian clothes stopped them and asked for their IDs and cell phones.

On Mahmoud’s phone they found videos of anti-government demonstrations and messages he sent to rebels from the Free Syrian Army, asking God to protect them and make them victorious. The men threw Mahmoud and his friend in the trunk of a car and drove them to a trash dump, where they were blindfolded, bound and beaten with sticks and large rocks before being taken to a security office.

Mahmoud was locked in a crowded cell with about a dozen other men, he said. Each day, some were taken out and new ones brought in.

“We were there for four days and they only gave us water to drink once. They never fed us,” he said. “They never asked us anything. Every day it was beating, beating, beating.”

Before dawn on Monday, guards pulled Mahmoud and 10 others from their cells and told they were going to see a judge. They were bound at the wrists, blindfolded and driven to Aleppo’s Khaldiyeh neighborhood, where they were lined up on a patch of rocky soil.

“They sat us all down next to each other, `You here, you here, you here,”’ Mahmoud said. “Then each one cocked his weapon and the shooting started.”

Mahmoud was shot three times. Bullets pierced his chest and foot and one grazed his skull. Minutes later, silence returned, and he realized he was still alive.

“I breathed, I said the shehada,” he said, referring to the Muslim declaration of faith meant to put him right with God. “I tried to get up then started screaming because blood was coming out of me.”

He scraped his face on a rock to remove the blindfold and crawled to where some nearby residents found him.

Among them was a 22-year-old electrician who said he heard the gunfire early Monday and worried that people were being killed because he had discovered six bodies in the same spot a day earlier. He showed videos of the victims on his cell phone, their bodies piled atop each other covered in blood, some bearing large bruises that appeared to be from beatings. He said all had been shot dead.

He and others asked not to have their names published because they have to pass through government checkpoints to get home.

The killings shocked residents of Khaldiyeh, a working-class neighborhood on Aleppo’s northwest side that has seen little violence until now. While many residents support the rebels, they have not established a foothold in the area, and the relative quiet has drawn thousands of people fleeing violence in other Aleppo neighborhoods or nearby villages.

As Mahmoud spoke, a white pickup pulled up outside the field hospital with the bodies of nine of the men killed Monday. The body of the tenth victim had been taken away by his family. All still had their hands bound and two still wore blindfolds. Two had bullet wounds to their heads, and others had blood on their faces and chests or coming out of their ears. None wore shoes.

Those killings convinced one Khaldiyeh resident who helped collect the bodies that the neighborhood needs arms.

“We want the Free Army to come to our neighborhood to protect us,” he said. “If they can’t come, then they need to give us weapons so we can defend ourselves.”

The field hospital’s doctor, Mohammed Ajaj, said he is no longer shocked when the dead and wounded pass through town on their way to burial in nearby villages or for treatment across the northern border in Turkey.

“We’ve gotten used to it,” he said.

An 18-year-old activist who helped collect the bodies said none of them had IDs.

“We really know nothing about them,” he said, adding that he would stop in neighboring villages to see if anyone recognized them before delivering them to a morgue further north.

“If nobody claims them, we’ll take their photos and put them on our Facebook page so their families can find out that they’re dead,” he said. 

France calls for humanitarian corridor to Homs after video plea from journalist injured in shelling that killed Marie Colvin

Edith Bouvier with a group of journalists trapped in the besieged city of Homs.

Edith Bouvier, the French journalist badly injured in the explosion that killed the Sunday Times journalist Marie Colvin, has issued a moving video plea for help in getting from the besieged city of Homs across the border to Lebanon.

Bouvier, a journalist with le Figaro, requested a ceasefire saying she needed urgent evacuation by ambulance because of the risk of suffering further blood loss from wounds sustained in the explosion that killed Colvin and a colleague.

Her appeal came as efforts to repatriate the bodies of the two dead journalists and their injured colleagues, including the photographer Paul Conroy, appeared to have stalled amid continued shelling.

Pictured lying in bed under a blanket, Bouvier gives her name and the date 23 February explaining that she was with “the group of journalists wounded in the attack in which Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik” were killed.

“I have a broken leg. The femur is broken along its length and laterally too. I need to undergo surgery as soon as possible. The doctors here have treated us as well as they could but they can’t perform surgery. So I need a ceasefire and an ambulance or car in good enough shape to get us out,” she says.

In a separate video, Conroy said he was being treated for three major leg wounds by opposition medics.

“I am currently being looked after by the Free Syrian Army medical staff who are treating me with the best medical treatment available. It’s important to add that I am here as a guest and not captured.

“Obviously any assistance that can be given by government agencies would be welcome,” says Conroy.

The appeal for help comes amid growing international pressure for a ceasefire and the opening of humanitarian corridors into the areas most badly affected by the conflict in Syria, including Baba Amr, the district of Homs in which Bouvier was injured, which has been under constant bombardment for 20 days, leading to hundreds of casualties.

A local doctor appearing in Bouvier’s video describes the problems she and other injured civilians trapped in the area face. “Edith needs medical care we don’t have. [And] mostly we are afraid of clotting which may cause her body to shock. She should be out of here immediately to have suitable medical care.”

Bouvier’s exhausted-looking photographer colleague William Daniels then explains he was “lucky” not to sustain any injuries in the explosion.

According to activists with the global advocacy network Avaaz, who spoke to the Guardian and other news outlets, 31-year-old Bouvier was being treated at a poorly equipped field hospital.

“There is a high risk she will bleed to death without urgent medical attention,” said a member of Avaaz. “We are desperately trying to get her out, doing all we can in extremely perilous circumstances.”

Activists said there were many other wounded Syrians in similarly dire conditions. The video of the journalists shows one unidentified woman sitting near Bouvier covered in blood.

“There are many civilians in a similar state. This is just a basic field hospital and we just don’t have the tools to treat them,” said one activist, Mahmoud, who said he helped bring the journalists to the makeshift clinic.

France has demanded that Syria offer it immediate access to the wounded journalists.

“I ask the Syrian government to stop immediately the attacks and respect its humanitarian obligations,” the French foreign minister, Alain Juppé, said in a statement.

“[We] have asked our embassy in Damascus to demand from Syrian authorities a securitised passage with medical help to be given to victims with the support of the International Red Cross.”

The men, all civilians, were mostly shot in the head or chest on Tuesday in their homes or in streets in the villages of Idita, Iblin and Balshon in Idlib province near the border with Turkey, the Syrian Network for Human Rights said.

“Military forces chased civilians in these villages, arrested them and killed them without hesitation. They concentrated on male youths and whoever did not manage to escape was to be killed,” the organisation said in a statement.

“Responsibility for this massacre lies with the general commander of the military and armed forces, Bashar al-Assad,” the statement said, adding that only one youth survived the shootings.

Several YouTube videos taken by local activists in Idlib, which could not be independently confirmed, showed bodies of young men with bullet wounds lying in streets and in houses.

One video shows the body of three youths, one visibly shot in the chest, on the floor of a house in Balshon.

“This is martyr Hassan Abdel Qadi al-Saeed, his brother Hussein and (their relative) Bashir Mohammad al-Saeed. They were liquidated by Assad’s forces in the February 21 massacre,” a voice of a man showing the bodies says, with the sound of women wailing in the background.

(Reporting by Khaled Yacoub Oweis, Amman newsroom; editing by David Stamp)

Monday, 23rd January 2012 03:49

Watch video here.

If you know the right people, who know the right routes there’s a way round the government checkpoints and into the parts of Homs controlled by anti-government forces.

On the outskirts of the city we met our first guide. His yellow taxi parked in a way in which we would recognise it.

Cameraman Nathan Hale and I followed him through farmland, down muddy lanes, then into the suburbs, taking side streets and alleyways, zig-zagging past the army patrols until we came to our first ‘Free Syrian Army’ FSA checkpoint.

In street after street of this predominantly Sunni district the walls of houses, shops, and offices were riddled with bullet holes, or blasted by tank rounds and the effects of rocket-propelled grenades.

Refuse was piled high everywhere. Most streets were deserted.

We switched cars and were taken to a house where a man with multiple wounds, he said from gunfire, was recovering in what was a friend’s spare room.

The facilities available to him were as rudimentary as those in the small clinic we then visited. It was in one room which used to be an office.

While we were there a young man came in supported by friends and with a large bandage on his foot. He said he’d been hit by a sniper’s bullet.

A doctor took an X-ray using a machine smuggled in by the underground - the lights flickered as the generator powering the clinic struggled to cope with the extra demand.

A few streets away the body of a man arrested by the army two weeks ago for carrying a pistol was brought back home from the morgue. The corpse of 23-year-old Hayyan Akhwan showed signs of torture.

The women of the family wept and ululated as he was prepared for burial. Then the men carried him out into the streets shouting anti-government slogans.

Carrying him above their heads, they walked in large circles, an honour for what they regard as a ‘Shaheed’, a martyr. They were showing him all the corners of the earth for the last time.

We headed across town, moving past a government held area, to get to the district of Bab Amr. There we found many more members of the FSA. They were suspicious of outsiders and didn’t want us filming the fortified bunkers they had prepared over the last few weeks.

The open space around the football stadium was a no-go area. Streets around it were devastated by fighting and a tower block on the far side in a government area was being used by snipers.

We were about to try and get back to the first district we visited when a guide received a phone call. An army ‘flying checkpoint’ had been set up on the route. More calls were made and a different safe route worked out. In all we switched cars five times.

Most people working on the oppositon side were reluctant to show their faces, but one army defector, Omar Shamsi, gave us an interview.

He began his statement ‘in the name of Allah’ and went on to say that when he joined the army he had sworn to defend the people, and that when he was ordered to open fire on civilians he switched sides.

He claimed that in his small district alone there were 30 army detectors. We could not verify that.

On the way out we spotted a family loading up a small truck with their household goods. “We’re leaving the bullets behind,” the head of the family told us. He added: “We’re going to Damascus.”

A woman appeared shouting about the nightmare of bombs and bullets. “Five families have left, just on this street,” she said, pointing at the shrapnel-marked walls of her home.

Last week, when we were in a government-controlled Allawite/Christian neighbourhood of Homs, we met Allawite and Christian people from Bab Amr who had come to live with their co-religionists.

Syria is slowly splitting - there are many caught in the middle who don’t want to have to be on either side.