Daraya Massacre

GRAPHIC:
Another massacre by Turkey’s sponsored FSA terrorists, wherever they infest they leave their fingerprints in order to terrify the people and make them revolt by force against their own government, just like what they do in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya… just everywhere USA’s Al Qaeda Federal Agency can get in to ‘democratize’ a country…
The camera of Addounia TV channel shows after it entered into the town images of bodies strewn here and there of women, men and children.
أفادت وكالة الأنباء السورية (سانا) في خبر يشمل تحركات الجيش السوري للقضاء على المسلحين في انحاء سورية، بأن قوات الجيش تواصل تطهير “منطقة داريا من فلول المجموعات الارهابية المرتزقة التي ارتكبت الجرائم بحق أبناء المدينة وروعتهم وخربت ودمرت الممتلكات العامة والخاصة”. واكدت ان العملية اسفرت “عن قتل عدد كبير من الإرهابيين المرتزقة وإلقاء القبض على عدد آخر ومصادرة كميات كبيرة من الأسلحة والذخائر وفككت ثلاث عبوات ناسفة زرعتها المجموعات الإرهابية المسلحة في شوارع داريا”.

ولم تتحدث الوكالة عن أية مجزرة وقعت في البلدة، في حين دخلت كاميرا قناة “الدنيا” الى البلدة واظهرت صور الجثث المنثورة هنا وهناك من نساء ورجال وأطفال. وذكرت مراسلة القناة ان الارهابيين مارسوا في البلدة “ما يتقنونه من اجرام”، وان جثث المدنيين مرمية في كل مكان. كما استعرضت الكاميرا صورا لجنود يسعفون المتضررين وشهود عيان يطالبون الجيش بحمايتهم وحماية اطفالهم وتخليصهم من المسلحين. وأكد احد الجنود الذي كان يحمل جثة طفل ان المسلحين يقتلون النساء والاطفال بدم بارد. بدوره اشار رجل أمن الى انه تم اكتشاف محرقة تضم مسلحين من غير السوريين وعددهم التقديري 40 شخصا، موضحا ان الحرق يأتي بغية تغطية هويات المسلحين. كما دخلت الكاميرا الى منزل حيث قام المسلحون بتصفية عائلة كاملة عن طريق الاعدام الميداني لاعتبارها من اتباع النظام.

ROBERT FISK WROTE FOR INDEPENDENT:

 

 

The massacre town of Daraya is a place of ghosts and questions. It echoed with the roar of mortar explosions and the crackle of gunfire yesterday, its few returning citizens talking of death, assault, foreign “terrorists”, and its cemetery of slaughter haunted by snipers.

The men and women to whom we could talk, two of whom had lost loved ones on Daraya’s day of infamy four days ago, told a story different from the version that has been repeated around the world: theirs was a tale of hostage-taking by the Free Syria Army and desperate prisoner-exchange negotiations between the armed opponents of the regime and the Syrian army, before President Bashar al-Assad’s government forces stormed into the town to seize it back from rebel control.

Officially, no word of such talks between the enemies has been mentioned. But senior Syrian officers told The Independent how they had “exhausted all possibilities of reconciliation” with those holding the town, while residents of Daraya said there had been an attempt by both sides to arrange a swap of civilians and off-duty soldiers – apparently kidnapped by rebels because of their family ties to the government army – with prisoners in the army’s custody. When these talks broke down, the army advanced into Daraya, six miles from the centre of Damascus.

Being the first Western eyewitness into the town yesterday was as frustrating as it was dangerous. The bodies of men, women and children had been moved from the cemetery where many of them were found; and when we arrived in the company of Syrian troops at the Sunni Muslim graveyard – divided by the main road through Daraya – snipers opened fire at the soldiers, hitting the back of the ancient armoured vehicle in which we made our escape. Yet we could talk to civilians out of earshot of Syrian officials – in two cases in the security of their own homes – and their narrative of last Saturday’s mass killing of at least 245 men, women and children suggested that the atrocities were far more widespread than supposed.

One woman, who gave her name as Leena, said she was travelling through the town in a car and saw at least 10 male bodies lying on the road near her home. “We carried on driving past, we did not dare to stop, we just saw these bodies in the street,” she said, adding that Syrian troops had not yet entered Daraya.

Another man said that, although he had not seen the dead in the graveyard, he believed that most were related to the government army and included several off-duty conscripts. “One of the dead was a postman – they included him because he was a government worker,” the man said. If these stories are true, then the armed men – wearing hoods, according to another woman who described how they broke into her home and how she kissed them in a fearful attempt to prevent them shooting her own family – were armed insurgents rather than Syrian troops.

The home of Amer Sheikh Rajab, a forklift truck driver, had been taken over, he said, by gunmen as a base for “Free Army” forces, the phrase the civilians used for the rebels. They had smashed the family crockery and burned carpets and beds – the family showed this destruction to us – but had also torn out the internal computer chip parts of laptops and television sets in the house. To use as working parts for bombs, perhaps?

On a road on the edge of Daraya, Khaled Yahya Zukari, a lorry driver, had been leaving the town on Saturday in a mini-bus with his 34-year-old wife Musreen and their seven-month-old daughter.

“We were on our way to [the neighbouring suburb of] Senaya when suddenly there was a lot of shooting at us,” he said. “I told my wife to lie on the floor but a bullet came into the bus and passed right through our baby and hit my wife. It was the same bullet. They were both dead. The shooting came from trees, from a green area. Maybe it was the militants hiding behind the soil and trees who thought we were a military bus bringing soldiers.”

Any widespread investigation of a tragedy on this scale and in these circumstances was virtually impossible yesterday. At times, in the company of armed Syrian forces, we had to run along empty streets with anti-government snipers at the intersections; many families had barricaded themselves in their homes.

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