«This is a revolution of ideals and principles»

Having more pressing business elsewhere, the Syrian army deserted the area last December.
Left to its own devices, the Free Syrian Army hoped that the province of Idlib would become the Syrian Benghazi, an opposition bastion from which to launch the military campaign that would liberate all of Syria.
The fall of Baba Amr after four weeks of sustained shelling, which the civilized world did nothing to prevent, stunned and dismayed many activists in the area.
That the Syrian army would now focus on Idlib seemed obvious to many.
We are expecting something like Baba Amr, an activist in Idlib told AP, as the shelling began last weekend.
The Free Syrian Army also knew that it would fare no better than its Baba Amr colleagues against the Syrian army, and for the same reasons.
We have no weapons-we have nothing to fight the Syrian army, a senior FSA commander told Anita McNaught of Aljazeera.
The FSA cannot effectively retaliate without RPGs and shoulder-launched missiles necessary to target Assad’s tanks and helicopters…
Foreign supporters of the Syrian opposition have provided next to nothing.
The weaponry coming from Iraq is old and inefficient.
On the black-market, a Kalashnikov goes for $1,300. Bullets cost $3 a piece, rates the FSA cannot afford.
Consequently, the FSA is an army devoid of weapons…
After four days of shelling, Idlib fell yesterday.
The Syrian army moved in and regained control of the city and its surroundings.
Since last night there has been no more fighting. The Free Syrian Army has withdrawn and regime forces have stormed the entire city and are carrying out house-to-house searches, Noureddin al-Abdo, a Syrian activist exiled in Beirut told AFP.
The Syrian army, according to a local activist, targeted residents trying to flee the city.
More than 20 people were killed and their bodies discarded in the al-Bilal mosque, he told Reuters.
The news agency also reported that FSA fighters had killed 10 regular army soldiers in an ambush in the Idlib region.
To prevent waves of residents of Homs and Idlib from seeking refuge in neighboring countries (as 30,000 Syrians have already done), the Assad regime last month planted thousands of Russian-made PMN-2 pressure mines along the border with Turkey.
Those fleeing their besieged homes (200,000)  have therefore, nowhere to go.
That seems to be the price to pay for those suspected of supporting the opposition and the FSA.
At a UN Human Rights Council meeting held in Geneva earlier this week, Paulo Pinheiro, Chairperson of the Commission of Inquiry on Syria, denounced what UN investigators have called collective punishment of civilians in Syria.
We are referring to indiscriminate bombardment of cities. Mortars sent on residents’ houses because they are under suspicion they collaborate with armed groups, the opposition. In that sense, we use the term collective punishment, Pinheiro said.
Assad’s assault on the Syrian people has killed 8,500, including more than 500 children…
In a report issued today, Amnesty International explained that the scale of torture and other ill-treatment in Syria has risen to a level not witnessed for years and is reminiscent of the dark era of the 1970s and 1980s…
The testimony presented in this report, taken in the context of other human rights violations committed against civilians in Syria, is yet further evidence that torture and other ill-treatment in Syria form part of a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population, carried out in an organized manner and as part of state policy and therefore amount to crimes against humanity, Amnesty International declared, according to Reuters.
Ann Harrison, of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa program, likened the experience of Syrian civilian victims to that of detainees under former president Hafez al-Assad-a nightmarish world of systematic torture.
Not surprisingly hence, Syrian opposition activists reported that a massacre of civilians had taken place in the Karm el-Zeytoun neighborhood of Homs this Sunday.
The bodies of 47 residents including women and children were found, some with their throats cut.
We were arrested by the army, then handed over to the shabiha. They poured fuel over us. They shot us-30 or 40 persons, a victim who managed to escape said, in a video posted on YouTube.
The shabiha (from the Arabic word for ghost) are militias composed of thugs armed and financed by the Assad regime.
Some of the children had been hit with blunt objects on their heads, one little girl was mutilated and some women were raped before being killed, Hadi Abdallah, a Homs activist, told AFP.
The regime denied it was responsible for the massacre and blamed terrorist armed groups instead.
It is in this context that Assad issued a decree yesterday scheduling parliamentary elections for May 7.
A free and fair election organized by a regime accused of committing crimes against humanity and that has arrested, tortured and killed thousands of its own people?
Parliamentary elections for a rubber-stamp parliament in the middle of the kind of violence we’re seeing across the country-it’s ridiculous, Victoria Nuland, US State Department spokeswomen said in Washington yesterday.
So the war against the Syrian people grinds on.
Assad can sleep soundly for now. His Russian patrons are not about to abandon him, yet.
We have specialists in Syria and we cooperate militarily with Syria. This is not a secret. We have a good, solid, military and technical cooperation with Syria. And today, we don’t have a basis to reconsider this military cooperation, Anatoly Antonov, Russian deputy defense minister told journalists in Moscow earlier this week.
Opposition activists cannot boast of similar support.
We are alone. We face this alone. No one is helping us, a FSA commander lamented.
These revolutionaries do not need nor desire a foreign military intervention.
They merely request the means to defend themselves against a brutal regime bountifully armed by Moscow.
We can do this revolution on our own-we don’t need the West to fight it for us, but we can’t do it without weapons, a young fighter told Aljazeera’s Anita McNaught.
In any case, though dismayed by the civilized world’s unwillingness to help them in any significant fashion, opponents of Assad are not about to relent.
We prefer death to more humiliation. We don’t want bread and fuel, although we need them. This is a revolution of ideals and principles. It’s a revolution of human beings who have been deprived of their humanity. We tasted freedom and we can’t go back again, an activist told Anita McNaught.
The Assad regime is doomed precisely because it will never succeed in annihilating those ideals and principles.
Only one relevant questions remains to be posed:
How many more Syrians will have to die before the civilized world finally steps in to help the Syrians remove Assad?
(the photograph above of a woman recovering from her wounds following the shelling of her house in Idlib last Saturday which killed her husband and two of her children is by Rodrigo Abd/AP Photo)

What has Assad done to the residents of Baba Amr?

Valerie Amos, the UN under secretary general for humanitarian affairs, was finally authorized by the Syrian government to enter Baba Amr on Thursday.
This Homs neighborhood was shelled continuously by the Assad regime's armed forces for four weeks.
At least 950 craters are visible on open lands, such as roads and farmland, from the impact of indirect fire weapons. The number of craters indicates the frequency of attacks and how many artillery and mortar shells have fallen. There are 640 buildings in the neighborhood with visible damage. However, the damage to buildings is likely to be significantly underestimated from viewing the satellite image because views from satellite images do not show hits to the sides of buildings made by explosive weapons, Human Rights Watch said after having examined a satellite photo of Baba Amr taken on February 25, five days before the shelling stopped.
I was horrified by the destruction I saw. Almost all the buildings had been destroyed and there were hardly any people there. I am extremely concerned as to the whereabouts of the people who have been displaced, Ms. Amos wrote in a statement released on Friday.
The authorities have not provided any information concerning the fate of Baba Amr’s residents.
Did they flee; were they victims of mass arrests, or killed? We do not know...
Ms. Amos has asked for unrestricted access to all areas subjected to violence in Syria, but has yet to receive an official response from the Assad government…
According to the BBC, activist groups continue to report the summary execution of men in Baba Amr, the butchering of entire families, and the systematic mass rape of women.
Outside of Homs, scores of civilians were killed in what was described as a new massacre by opposition activists.  Forty-four of them reportedly belonged to just two families…
A similar massacre was reported near Idlib, when troops opened fire, killing some twenty civilians.
The regime blames the violence on what it calls armed terrorist gangs.
Tanks also targeted the Homs neighborhood of Karam al-Zeitoun.
Thirty tanks entered my neighborhood at seven this morning and they are using their cannons to fire on houses, Karam Abu Rabea, a resident of the neighborhood, told Aljazeera.
Although the uprising began one year, the regime is remaining steadfast, according to senior US intelligence officials quoted in the WP, and Assad is very much in charge.
The Alawite establishment that governs the country has remained unified and determined not to relinquish power.
With so much blood having been shed by its security apparatus, it has no other option but to fight to the finish.
Were Assad to cede power, then he and his inner circle would no doubt face war crimes charges…
Hence, the uprising launched by the pro-democracy movement will be a long and bloody one, no doubt.
That leadership is going to fight very hard. The odds are against them, but they are going to fight very hard, one US intelligence official told the WP.
Meanwhile, the special envoy of the UN and the Arab League, Kofi Annan, will be in Damascus today to try and find a political solution to the Syrian crisis.
We will be urging the government and a broad spectrum of Syrian opposition to come together to work with us to find a solution that will respect the aspirations of the Syrian people, Annan said yesterday in Cairo.
The Syrian opposition did not look favorably upon this initiative, however.
It feels like we are watching the same movie being repeated over and over again.
My fear is, like other international envoys before him, the aim is to waste a month or two of pointless mediation efforts, Burhan Ghalioun, head of the Syrian National Council, told AP yesterday.
Indeed, while Mr. Annan negotiates with Assad, the latter’s forces will continue killing men, women and children…
(the satellite photo of Baba Amr was found here)

It's not a war, it's a massacre...

Baba Amr remains completely sealed off, though it fell six days ago, after Free Syrian Army soldiers withdrew from the Homs neighborhood that had been shelled continuously for over four long weeks by Assad’s army.
The regime’s security forces have now moved in, free to wreak havoc as they please with no one to witness their brutality.
As I’m talking to you now, people are dying. There was no restraint with the cameras there. God knows what’s happening now the cameras are gone, Paul Conroy told Sky News last Friday.
The British photographer was wounded in the attack that killed Sunday Times reporter Marie Colvin and French photographer Rémi Ochlik in Homs on February 22.
French reporter Edith Bouvier was also injured, suffering a broken leg.
Conroy, Bouvier, French journalist William Daniels and Spanish reporter Javier Espinosa were all smuggled out of the city last week, before it fell…
According to witnesses in Homs, the security apparatus is now exacting a heavy price from a neighborhood and city that dared to defy Assad.
The government has control over Homs again. They are arresting many people, a Homs resident now exiled in Beirut told the NYT.
Empty buses were seen moving into neighborhoods, then leaving filled with young men and boys, she said, wrote the NYT’s Neil MacFarquhar.
Other activists accuse the regime of deliberately destroying houses and executing  Baba Amr residents suspected of being Free Syrian Army sympathizers.
The smell of death was everywhere. We could smell the bodies buried under the rubble all the time. We saw so much death that at the end the sight of a dismembered body…stopped moving us, Ahmad, a Baba Amr resident who fled to Lebanon, told The Guardian.
Since the Assad regime’s onslaught on Baba Amr began early last month, over 700  residents have been killed.
A convoy of seven trucks dispatched by the International Committee of the Red Cross have been waiting on the outskirts of Baba Amr since Friday, but has still not received the regime’s authorization to enter and deliver much needed aid to its beleaguered population.
The regime explains it is not safe to go there, even though it also claims that order has been restored in the neighborhood.
At the moment we are blocked by the Syrian army and government. The situation is extremely difficult, the weather conditions are tragic. It is very cold, there is fighting and people don’t have access to food or water, and above all there is a big problem of evacuating the wounded, Yves Daccord, the director general of the ICRC, told RTS (Swiss Radio and Television).
A grisly fate awaits Homs’ wounded should they fall in the hands of the Assad regime.
The French photographer Mani, apparently still in Homs, obtained a video secretly filmed in the Homs military hospital by an employee which was shown yesterday on Britain’s Channel 4 News.
In the video, patients are seen chained to their hospital beds, some visibly showing signs of torture.
I have seen detainees being tortured by electrocution, whipping, beating with batons, and by breaking their legs. They twist the feet until the leg breaks. I saw them slamming detainees’ heads against walls. They shackle the patients to beds. They deny them water. Others have their penises tied to stop them from urinating, the hospital employee told Mani.
The pictures are truly shocking, Rupert Colville, UN High Commission for Human Rights spokesman said Tuesday.
 The UN has received similar information corroborating Channel 4 News’ report, according to Colville.
Torture and killings reportedly took place in the Homs military hospital-which is the one shown in Channel 4 footage-by security forces dressed as doctors and allegedly acting with the complicity of medical personnel. In other words, what the (UN) commission of inquiry reported back in November is pretty much what you see both visually and in the witness account in the Channel 4 footage, the spokesman said.
The UN’s inquiry also discovered that the Homs military and Latakia state hospitals had been transformed into torture centers actually within the hospitals.
Latakia is Syria’s main port city, located in the north of the country.
It was attacked by Syrian armed forces ships and tanks last August.
Security agents, in some cases joined by medical staff, chained seriously injured patients to their beds, electrocuted them, beat wounded parts of their body or denied medical attention and water. Medical personnel who did not collaborate faced reprisals, he added.
The brutality of the country’s security forces is notorious. Methods of torture, most of which are known to have been used in Syria over many years, not just in the past year, include severe beatings, electric shocks, suspension for long periods by the limbs, psychological torture and routine humiliation, he concluded.
The international community, although currently paralyzed by Russia and China’s refusal to authorize any meaningful action against their friend Assad, are taking note, however.
The European Union is currently compiling evidence of war crimes committed by the Assad regime, which will one day be utilized against its dignitaries, once the regime falls, as it inevitably will…
I would like to remind Bashar Assad: his father was not made to account for what he did in this world, but his son will sooner or later account for what he did, for the massacre and the oppression. This time, the blood shed in Syrian cities will not go unpunished, Racep Tayyip Erdogan Turkey’s Prime Minister, declared yesterday.
The Assad regime, although severely rattled by the scope and scale of the opposition confronting it, is by no means finished.
Its armed forces are gaining physical momentum on the battlefield…The situation will get worse before it gets better, Marine Gen. James Mattis, Commander of US Central Command, told the US Senate yesterday.
Assad is going to be there for some time because I think he will continue to employ heavier and heavier weapons on his people, he added.
Syria can also count on Russia’s unwavering support.
The fact that the Russian presidential campaign is now over and that Putin was reelected (in an election marred by accusations of  fraud) will have no effect on its policy regarding Syria.
The latter will certainly not become more conciliatory and amenable to Western pressure. Such expectations would be wishful thinking, according to the Russians.
Russia’s stand on the Syrian settlement has never been subject to any short-term considerations, and hasn’t formed under the influence of electoral cycles, unlike that of some of our Western colleagues, a Russia foreign ministry statement said.
As such, the Assad regime can still afford to remain defiant.
The Syrian people, who have in the past managed to crush foreign plots…have again proven their ability to defend the nation and to build a new Syria through their determination to pursue reforms while confronting foreign-backed terrorism, Assad declared yesterday.
The regime however, has not repudiated all attempts by the outside world to find a peaceful solution to the Syrian crisis.
Kofi Annan, a former UN Secretary General, appointed by the UN and the Arab League as their special representative for Syria, plans to go to Damascus on Saturday. The regime welcomes the visit.
Valerie Amos, the UN under secretary general for humanitarian affairs, has finally been granted leave to enter Syria, for a three-day visit.
This afternoon, she succeeded in accompanying a team of Red Crescent volunteers into Baba Amr...
The security apparatus' clean-up operation must thus be over...
Simultaneously however, the regime is escalating its attacks on rebel strongholds.
In Dera’a province, birthplace of the uprising one year ago, the city of Hirak is now surrounded by tanks and under attack.
The clashes are very intense and have been going on since morning, Rami Abdul-Rahman, of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, bases in London, told AP.
Rastan is now also under attack, as is Qusair, near Homs.
In addition, the Syrian armed forces destroyed a bridge over the Orontes river linking Lebanon and Syria, which was used by refugees, wounded activists and journalists to flee the country...
More than 1,500 refugees have made their way to Lebanon in recent days...
Yet, gradually, the regime is slowly losing control of some parts of the country, as the struggle to crush heavy-handedly all pockets of resistance depletes its resources.
Although the government has retaken Homs, it’s losing Aleppo and the broader north, an area that has long been fertile ground for islamist currents, Joshua Landis, an expert on Syria and professor at the University of Oklahoma, wrote on his Syria Comment blog.
The loss of Aleppo, the country’s economic capital, would be a serious blow.
Yet, the struggle is bound to be a long one, particularly since the opposition will have to rely solely on itself to prevail.
The international community is divided, appalled (for the most part) by the regime’s brutality, but terrified at the prospect of Assad’s fall. It sympathizes with the opposition, but has evinced little interest in taking concrete steps to promote its cause.
We may one day regret our reticence to help a people in need.
What does that indifference say about us and the values we profess to uphold?
People brought me in half a baby, saying « where’s the help »?, recalled Paul Conroy.
And I have no answer. I don’t know how we can stand by and watch this. It’s not a war; it’s a massacre, it’s the indiscriminate massacre of men, women and children.
In the years to come we’re going to look back, we’re going to have the shame of sitting back and watching it again, as in Srebrenica, as in Rwanda, and we’re going to say « how did we let this happen under our nose? », Conroy said.
And yet, let it happen we did…
(the YouTube video above is a report compiled by Channel 4 News)

The fall of Baba Amr...

After nearly four weeks of shelling, and as the Syrian army prepared its final onslaught against the rebellious Homs neighborhood of Baba Amr, reinforcements from the elite Fourth Division, commanded by Maher al-Assad, the Syrian dictator’s elder brother, arrived in town.
We were able to identify from the distinctive signs visible on the armor and we have elements within the army who informed us in advance of the arrival of theses reinforcements, Hamza al-Omar, a member of the Syrian Revolution General Commission, told France24.
Among other things, Maher is known as the butcher of Deera for having personally led the assault against protesters in this southern Syrian city last spring.
Once Syrian troops moved into Baba Amr, backed by tanks and armored vehicles, it took them but 36 hours to gain full control.
The Free Syrian Army lacked the military resources to resist accordingly.
The equipment it did possess, such as machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and one tank it managed to seize from the enemy, was simply no match for the Syrian army’s superior firepower, consisting of artillery, multiple rocket launchers, helicopters and tanks firing 120ml rounds.
But by the end we ran out of ammunition. We were under siege for 27 days. We used everything we had. We couldn’t continue fighting any more, Omar al-Homsi, a FSA officer from Baba Amr, told The Guardian.  
Following a month of heavy bombardment and shelling from tanks, rockets, mortars and all kinds of heavy weapons, the Free Syrian Army could not hold on longer, Col. Malik al-Kurdi, a spokesman for the FSA based in Turkey, told the WP.
In addition, living conditions in the devastated neighborhood had deteriorated to such an extent that the fighting had to cease if the local population was to survive.
All the routes we could use to provide the city with food and medication were completely cut off. We simply couldn’t stay there any more, al-Homsi added.
On a Facebook page, the FSA explained why it had decided to leave the area.
We, the Bab Amr brigade, have decided to withdraw strategically for the sake of the civilians remaining inside the neighborhood. The humanitarian situation is at its worst, as there is no food whatsoever, no medicines, no water and no electricity, the statement said.
Yesterday, Baba Amr inhabitants were trying to catch falling snowflakes with pots and pans...
As Syrian troops swept through the neighborhood, checking each building to ensure no FSA members were hiding, activists reported that, in the process, they were detaining all males over the age of fifteen.
Fears that the regime would seek revenge for the city’s defiance on anyone it could get its hands on were rampant.
We are very concerned about the civilians because the history of this regime means they are likely to kill everyone who is there, Wissam Tarif, of the activist group Avaaz, told Liz Sly of the WP, from Beirut.
According to some reports, the bodies of seventeen beheaded victims were found in an area adjacent to Baba Amr, civilians apparently trying to flee the city.
The regime and its supporters were jubilant that resistance in Baba Amr had been crushed.
It’s the beginning of Syria’s final victory over the Qatari, Saudi, French, American and Zionist conspiracy against Syria, Taleb Ibrahim, a pro-government Syrian analyst told a Lebanese Hezbollah TV network, according to The Guardian.
Opposition activists were adamant that the FSA’s retreat did not signify the end of the struggle against the brutal Assad regime.
It will not stop the uprising. There will be a new centre of the revolution and the Free Syrian Army, Sami, a Homs activist told The Guardian.
The FSA, for its part, was defiant.
We warn the Assad regime against any reaction that will target civilians and we place full responsibility on the regime for the safety of the civilians who are caught in the middle of this.
We warn, any action by the regime that crosses the limits and affects civilians will see a severe response from our side. We promise you, the people of Syria, Baba Amr will remain the eye and heart of this revolution until we gain full victory. Whatever the price we have to pay and whatever we have to give up…we are returning stronger, god willing, the Facebook statement said.
The last two foreign journalists remaining in Homs, Edith Bouvier and William Daniels managed at last to reach Lebanon on Thursday evening. They are expected in Paris late Friday
The two French journalists, along with Paul Conroy, a British photographer who had accompanied Marie Colvin and was wounded in the attack that killed her and French photographer Rémi Ochlik, and the Spanish reporter Javier Espinosa had set off for Lebanon on Sunday, guided and protected by Syrian activists and FSA members.
Edith Bouvier had also been wounded in last week’s attack, suffering a broken leg.
They simply could no longer remain in Homs. Syrian troops were deliberately targeting the building in which they found refuge, soon to be reduced to rubble.
The Syrians were firing at them from four different directions. They were trying to kill them, one witness told The Guardian.
In addition, the journalists no longer had access to food and water.
The Syrian security forces however,  monitored the lone escape route leading out of the neighborhood towards Lebanon.
As a result, therefore, once underway, the group was fired upon, leading to its dislocation. Conroy went on ahead, but Espinosa stayed behind to tend to the Syrian escorts wounded in the attack. Thirteen local activists were killed in this attempt to save the journalists…
Although the Spanish reporter was subsequently able to pursue his journey, Bouvier and Daniels were compelled to turn back…
Conroy reached Lebanon on Tuesday and Espinosa the next day.
Bouvier and Daniels, who were moved from Baba Amr to an adjacent neighborhood on Tuesday, were successfully escorted to Lebanon on Thursday.
According to videos posted online on Thursday however, Marie Colvin and Rémi Ochlik were buried in Homs on February 27.
The lack of electricity and fuel prevented the adequate preservation of their remains.
During a burial ceremony, a physician, Dr. Mohammed al-Mohammed described Marie Colvin as a martyr. She was telling the truth about what is happening in Baba Amr. May God be merciful to you, Marie, as we bury you in this garden, he said.
In a separate video, he commended Rémi Ochlik for doing his humanitarian duty and doing his duty as completely as possible to send the true picture of what is going on in Baba Amr during the most terrible time, according to Aljazeera.
The battle has now moved to other restive n neighborhoods of Homs, such as al Bayada, al-Khalidiyeh and Karm al-Zeytoun.
The security forces will then head to Hama, leveled in 1982 by Assad’s father Hafez, and Idlib, both in open revolt.
The army does not have the resources to attack on several fronts simultaneously, however.
It is not strong enough to fight in the whole country, but it is strong enough to fight civilians and defectors with light weapons. They don’t have enough troops to deal with all these uprisings at the same time, so they go from one to one to one, Akil Hashem, an adviser to the Syrian National Council, and a retired general, told the NYT.
No doubt, the Fourth Division will play a key role in this campaign.
The Fourth Division is known for its brutality and it’s a symbol of the regime’s striking force, Khattar Abou Diab, a political scientist at Paris-XI University, told France24.
This squad of killers is very experienced and highly trained. They are commanded by career officers and have the best weapons available in Syria. Unable to deploy on all fronts, it has been divided into several sections to supervise and direct the various law enforcement operations, Hashem told the French news  network.
They are composed predominantly of Alawites, a Shiite sect representing about 10% of the Syrian population. The Alawites dominate the security apparatus and senior official positions. Assad is himself an Alawite.
Yet, the brutality of Assad’s campaign has rattled even his staunchest supporters.
Yesterday, both Russia and China approved a UN Security Council resolution demanding that Syria authorize immediate, full and unimpeded access of humanitarian personnel to all populations in need of assistance, in accordance with international law and guiding principles of humanitarian assistance,… in all  areas affected by fighting and violence, including Homs, Hama, Deera and Idlib.
Not coincidentally, the Syrian government authorized the International Committee of the Red Cross to operate in the country and begin delivering humanitarian assistance.
Seven trucks carrying humanitarian aid reached Homs on Friday.
Although international pressure on Assad may thus be increasing, he will also have to contend with a resilient opposition that has no intention of backing down.
The Syrian government, due to its brutality, has the upper hand. This is a setback (the fall of Baba Amr), but it does not at all mean the downfall of the revolution. That, I am sure, is mission impossible, Rami Jarrah, a Syrian activist, head of the Activists News Association based in Cairo, told the WP.
Furthermore, the fact that Assad has succeeded in ridding Homs of the presence of foreign journalists (either by killing them or doing his utmost to do so) does not mean he will succeed in preventing the world from witnessing the brutal and abject repression of his own people.
Countless Syrian citizen journalists will continue reporting on Assad’s cruel and criminal campaign to subdue a Syrian population yearning for freedom and justice.
Javier Espinosa paid tribute to these fearless reporters, including Abu Hanin, head of Baba Amr’s makeshift media center. I never saw « journalists » so brave, he wrote in a Twitter message on Friday.
Guns and shells cannot crush that kind of courage and determination.
Assad’s days are numbered, for the Syrians have gone too far and suffered too much to surrender now…
(the photograph of blood flowing in the gutters of Baba Amr is by Javier Espinosa)