When the images and details of the
massacre in the western Syrian town of Houla were released, the comparisons with
other horrific killings were inevitable: My Lai, Srebrenica, Rwanda. More than
100 people, half of them children and a third of them women, were killed on the
evening of May 25, after Friday prayers, in the Taldou neighborhood. Some died
as a result of hours of shelling by tanks and Syrian army artillery, but most
were killed by death squads from the surrounding villages, thugs who slit their
neighbors' throats or shot them at close range.
Killers Went From House to House
The men, some in civilian clothing and others dressed in army uniforms, went from house to house,waffen ss uniforms reported survivors like 11-year-old Ali, who told CBS News: "They came to our house at night. First they took out my father and then my oldest brother. My mother shouted: Why are you doing this? Then they shot both of them, and after that my mother. Then one of the men came in with a flashlight and saw my sister Rasha. He shot her in the head." Ali hid with his two little brothers. The man saw them and shot the brothers, but he missed Ali.
Other survivors who hid or played dead consistently gave the same accounts: The men combed through house after house and room after room, killing everyone, some with knives and some with guns. The massacre continued until the morning hours. When the UN observers arrived, they found nothing but corpses in the villages controlled by regime forces. The survivors had fled to neighborhoods held by the FSA, where they placed the bodies they had recovered on mats in the mosques before filming and burying them.
The regime in Damascus could not deny that the massacre had taken place. But Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdissi, parroting the government's standard position, promptly blamed the killings on "armed terrorists" and "Islamists." The Russian government, which had blocked every Security Council resolution condemning Syria, launched into a bizarre attempt to apportion the blame. The regime was apparently responsible for the assault by tanks and mortars, said Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. But the brutish murders, said Alexey Puchkov, chairman of the parliamentary committee on foreign affairs, "were definitely committed by the other side."
Igor Pankin, Russia's deputy UN ambassador, agreed: "We cannot imagine that it is in the Syrian regime's interest to sabotage Special Envoy Kofi Annan's visit to Damascus." And he is right in one respect. In PR terms, a massacre of children cannot be helpful to the Assad regime. But he was wrong in another sense, inadvertently putting his finger on Russia's growing frustration with its ally: Syria's leadership is no longer taking decisions that would make sense for a government hoping to reach a political solution to the crisis.
Killers Went From House to House
The men, some in civilian clothing and others dressed in army uniforms, went from house to house,waffen ss uniforms reported survivors like 11-year-old Ali, who told CBS News: "They came to our house at night. First they took out my father and then my oldest brother. My mother shouted: Why are you doing this? Then they shot both of them, and after that my mother. Then one of the men came in with a flashlight and saw my sister Rasha. He shot her in the head." Ali hid with his two little brothers. The man saw them and shot the brothers, but he missed Ali.
Other survivors who hid or played dead consistently gave the same accounts: The men combed through house after house and room after room, killing everyone, some with knives and some with guns. The massacre continued until the morning hours. When the UN observers arrived, they found nothing but corpses in the villages controlled by regime forces. The survivors had fled to neighborhoods held by the FSA, where they placed the bodies they had recovered on mats in the mosques before filming and burying them.
The regime in Damascus could not deny that the massacre had taken place. But Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdissi, parroting the government's standard position, promptly blamed the killings on "armed terrorists" and "Islamists." The Russian government, which had blocked every Security Council resolution condemning Syria, launched into a bizarre attempt to apportion the blame. The regime was apparently responsible for the assault by tanks and mortars, said Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. But the brutish murders, said Alexey Puchkov, chairman of the parliamentary committee on foreign affairs, "were definitely committed by the other side."
Igor Pankin, Russia's deputy UN ambassador, agreed: "We cannot imagine that it is in the Syrian regime's interest to sabotage Special Envoy Kofi Annan's visit to Damascus." And he is right in one respect. In PR terms, a massacre of children cannot be helpful to the Assad regime. But he was wrong in another sense, inadvertently putting his finger on Russia's growing frustration with its ally: Syria's leadership is no longer taking decisions that would make sense for a government hoping to reach a political solution to the crisis.
没有评论:
发表评论