Tremseh: Assad’s third massacre in seven weeks

Warning: Graphic images from Tremseh

Warning: Graphic images from Tremseh

The Syrian government’s armed forces and paramilitary shabiha Thursday slaughtered some 220 men, women and children in Tremseh, a small Sunni village in Syria’s central province of Hama.

It is not only the third copycat massacre in seven weeks, but also the bloodiest in the Syria conflict.

The first massacre was in Houla, north of Homs, on May 25, when over 100 villagers, including dozens of women and children, were either shot or stabbed to death.

The second was on June 6 in Qubair, twelve miles from Hama, Syria’s fifth largest city, where at least 78 civilians were massacred, 40 of them women and children.

Yesterday’s was in Tremseh, again near Hama, where Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez, killed some 30,000 civilians in the February 1982 Hama Massacre.

Tremseh was attacked with helicopter gunships and tanks before the shabiha militia went in on foot and carried out the execution-style killings with knives and AK-47s. They then torched some of the houses and bodies.

Activists say many of the victims were displaced people from the neighboring village of Khneizra.

They say bodies are stacked in Tremseh’s mosque and many others are either buried under the rubble or scattered in the farming fields.

Activists say government forces surrounded the village on Thursday morning and heavily bombarded it for several hours, killing many people.

Shabiha militias from nearby Alawite villages then moved in, they said, killing many more villagers and setting fire to houses. Others who tried to flee through fields were also gunned down, the activists said.

One activist, named Ahmed, told Reuters: "So far, we have 20 victims recorded with names and 60 bodies at a mosque. There are more bodies in the fields, bodies in the rivers and in houses... People were trying to flee from the time the shelling started and whole families were killed trying to escape."

Gen. Mustafa al-Sheikh, head of the Free Syria Army’s Military Council, said there were no FSA fighters in Tremseh, “which was attacked because it supports the revolution.”

The commander of the FSA, Col. Riad al-Asaad, confirmed this and urged Syrians, whether military or civilian, to mobilize, cutoff roads and attack military airports.

The opposition umbrella Syrian National Council (SNC) said in a statement the gruesome massacre in Tremseh “ranks among the Syrian regime’s most infamous genocides.”

Separately, the SNC’s Human Rights Bureau put the number of Syrians killed on Thursday at “more than 343, among them many women and children… most of whom were victims of a massacre in Tremseh.”

UN and Arab League envoy for Syria Kofi Annan says he is “shocked and appalled” at reports of mass killings in Tremseh.

“Mothballed” in Hama since June 16, some of his UN observers are now reportedly trying to reach Tremseh “to investigate” the killings.

Wafik al-Samarraie, writing for the leading Saudi daily Asharq Alawsat, warns today, “Do not underestimate the genocide campaigns’ danger to the revolution.”

“Without wanting to cause a major letdown,” he opines, “the facts show the regime still has the upper hand on the ground as well as the ability to mount extermination campaigns that pause a serious threat to the revolution.

“While weapons and hardware continue to flow abundantly into the regular army’s depots, military supplies liable to help insurgents protect civilians remain wanting.

“Until this writing, not one shoulder-launched missile has been fired at warplanes or gunships targeting civilians. Pictures showing FSA fighters carrying man-portable anti-tank weapons are extremely rare although civilians are constantly bombarded by tank formations.

“We’ve heard a lot from the regime and its backers about the ‘flood of military gear reaching the insurgents’, but there is no sign of this anywhere. The few cars we see on video clips are antiquated and unfit for the battlefield. Personal weapons the insurgents are carrying date back to the 1950s. You can also tell from the video clips the insurgents hardly have anything resembling military dress or boots. All this proves the Syria arms embargo is clamped on one side only…”

It is noteworthy, Samarraie concludes, that the regime has in recent weeks resorted to salami slicing tactics, whereby it would isolate chunks of restive areas and then blitz each one in turn. The process pauses a significant threat to the arms-starved revolution. “If this persists, the outcome is fraught with uncertainty.”

Annan-Houla-Qubair and back to Annan

QUBAIR VICTIMS: Children, a baby (right) and a grandmother (top right)

Scores of video clips of the Qubair massacre are already posted on Youtube

After troubleshooter Kofi Annan’s entry to the Syria scene came the massacres -- first in Houla and now in the Hama countryside.

By tonight, Annan will be pulling a rabbit out of his hat. He will tell the 15 members of the UN Security Council of his “Plan B” and then wait for the count of takers.

The death count in yesterday’s Hama countryside massacre is provisionally put at 86, many of them women and children.

Government-backed shabiha militiamen stabbed and shot their victims in the villages of Mazraat al-Qubair and Maarzaf, about 20 kilometers northwest of the city of Hama.

"They executed [nearly] every person in the village. Very few numbers could flee. The majority were slaughtered with knives and in a horrible and ugly way," one activist in Hama told the BBC's World Tonight.

"The small number of villagers who fled were the only people remaining who could tell the world about this horrible massacre."

A Qubair resident told the BBC when the army and militia left the village, he discovered about 40 bodies -- mostly women and children who had been stabbed to death. He said he saw the burned corpse of a three-month-old baby.

Activists, including the Observatory based in Britain, called for an immediate investigation. "The Syrian Observatory for Human rights calls on the international monitors to go immediately to the area. They should not wait to tomorrow to investigate this new massacre," it said in a statement.

"They should not give the excuse that their mission is only to observe the ceasefire, because many massacres have been committed during their presence in Syria."

In a statement on state TV quoted by AFP news agency, the government said "a terrorist group” committed the “heinous crime".

The Local Coordination Committees, an activist network, said the Qubair killings took the total number of people killed nationwide by security forces on Wednesday to 140.

Annan, the joint UN-Arab League envoy, will give his latest assessment of the Syrian crisis at an open meeting of the UN General Assembly on Thursday morning (New York time) and then brief the Security Council behind closed doors later in the afternoon.

UN diplomats expect Annan to present Security Council members with a new proposal to rescue his failing peace plan -- a "contact group" of world and regional powers to help end the violence. The group would bring together Russia, China, the United States, Britain, France and key regional players, such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Iran.

If this is what Annan plans to suggest, he's already been met with objections from the U.S. and Britain, who don't want Iran to participate.

Leading political analyst Abdelwahhab Badrakhan, writing today for the pan-Arab daily al-Hayat, says what comes next after the collapse of Annan’s six-point plan “is unclear – except that the gradual trend for outside intervention is already on the table.

“But such intervention, if it were to happen, won’t restore the regime’s lost national and pan-Arab virginity. The regime proved so brutal and oppressive and committed so many crimes as to make its forcible ouster a humanitarian duty.

“Obviously, invoking Chapter VII of the UN Charter, as the Arab League wants, won’t be easy. It would mean eventual recourse to military action, which is anathema to Russia and Iran. They are the two countries intruding the most to buttress the regime. But both know the regime can’t survive -- hence their concern.

“The Russians and Iranians want to secure their postmortem interests. And the only way they can do so is to have a hand in configuring the next regime’s shape.”

Badrakhan says time is short for the “grand bargain” that would put all the principal bilateral differences between Washington and Tehran – including Syria -- on the table at the same time and agree to resolve them as a package.

True, he says, the idea of a palace coup in Syria (that would overthrow President Bashar al-Assad by his inner circle) has become redundant. But it always remained the inevitable synonym of “real reform.” To preempt the growing threat of outside intervention lacking a UN mandate, Russia and Iran have no viable option to safeguard their national interests other than engineer a palace coup in Damascus.

“Syria: Why the hate for Homs?”

"Safe corridor along the coastline from Homs to Damascus & Lebanon's Bekaa"

Why the hate for Homs?

An anonymous guest posed the question last February on an Internet board, saying:

“I've been following news of the uprising in Syria, and one thing that strikes me about it is that the Syrian government's crackdown in Homs seems to be approaching genocidal levels -- it looks like they're trying to wipe the city off the map. Why? Is there an ethnic or religious minority that's concentrated in that city, and the Assad regime is using the uprising as an excuse to do some ‘cleansing’?

“My first thought was that maybe Homs is a Kurdish city, but a quick check of Wikipedia shows that Homs is near Lebanon, which I'm pretty sure is the wrong part of the country for it to have many Kurds. The Wiki page about Homs doesn't give me any clues as to why this particular city should be targeted so aggressively. Can anyone explain what's going on over there?”

The explanation comes today from Lebanese political analyst Walid Choucair, writing for the Saudi-owned pan-Arab daily al-Hayat under the title “A safe corridor for the regime.”

In his opinion:

“The Syrian regime will neither change its conduct nor amend its plan.

“The regime has had, since the onset of the Syrian crisis, two objectives – one maximal and another minimal.

Walid Choucair

“The maximal goal is to smother the uprising by force, irrespective of the cost. This is proving to be an increasingly unattainable goal due to the extraordinary resilience of part of the Syrian people and their resolve to bring down the regime in spite of its vicious reprisals.

“The minimal objective is to cleanse certain areas, even at the expense of letting the rebels gain a foothold elsewhere. The focus of this cleansing campaign is Homs -- (Syria’s third-largest city and home to about 1.5 million people) that was known as ‘Sun City’ in ancient times -- and its surrounding villages. The intent is to create a safe corridor for the regime and its backers through Homs between the Syrian coastline and Damascus on one hand and the Lebanese borders on the edges of Lebanon’s northern Bekaa, on the other. 

“The vicious drive by the regime and its backers to fulfill this minimal objective promotes a demographic cleansing of this specific district by way of massacres (Baba Amr and Houla, for example), executions, and the forced displacement to date of between 800,000 and 900,000 of its residents to other parts of Syria or out of the country.

“The regime has no qualms about razing buildings, homes and entire neighborhoods and wiping them off the map as it is doing in Homs and its surroundings…” 

The whodunit answer to Houla massacre

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“Syria’s foreign ministry spokesman Jihad Makdissi categorically denied government responsibility for the Houla massacre, saying a military judiciary committee was set up to investigate, and its findings will be made public in three days. If the regime is so confident of its innocence, why does it not involve a team from UNSMIS [United Nations Supervision Mission in Syria] in the investigation so the findings can be completely aboveboard?”

Abdelbari Atwan in al-Quds al-Arabi

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