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 The Free Syrian Army has withdrawn and regime forces have stormed the entire city and are carrying out house-to-house searches, Noureddin al-Abdo, a Syrian activist exiled in Beirut told AFP.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)
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