Syria: Villagers killed as loyalists send warning

When the violence was over, Ahmad ventured out from his hiding place in an attic. In less than two hours, Baida, his picturesque village near the Mediterranean, had become the scene of one of the worst mass killings in Syria’s two-year-old war.

As the country fragments under the weight of civil strife, troops loyal to Bashar al-Assad have made gains against rebel fighters in a counter-offensive to secure a corridor linking the capital Damascus with the president’s clan heartland on the coast.

Baida, a tiny pocket of rebel sympathisers surrounded by pro-Assad villages, was an ideal place for the government to deliver a harsh message.

International peace talks are expected to be held in Geneva next month, but there is little hope of a breakthrough to end a war that has already killed 80,000 – and left Baida a shell.

A few steps from his home, somewhere near the main village square, Ahmad discovered his brother’s body.

“He had been stripped of his clothes,” he said, reading from his own record of what he saw. He paused and composed himself. “He had been shot in the head, and the bullet left a gaping hole the size of a hand. His blood had been shed on the ground.”

For almost 90 minutes Ahmad described how he found torched bodies and evidence of mass killings: in one case 30 men, and in another, 20 women and children who had hidden in a small room.

He read out the names of the dead, their occupations, ages and relations to each other, and the positions of their bodies.

The attack left dozens of his relatives and neighbours dead. Ahmad recorded every detail so that history might judge.

It was 2 May, a Thursday and the start of a six-day holiday.

Many students had come home, and the men of the village had no plans to venture down to the coast to sell their vegetable crops, as many usually do. Children had no school that day.

The cocks had already crowed when armed men entered Baida, a close-knit village of narrow alleys that was home to 5,000 mostly Sunni Muslims.

Baida, visible from surrounding Alawite villages with whose inhabitants it had coexisted well enough before the war, sits just outside the small town of Banias, which overlooks Syria’s coastline from the hills.

According to opposition activists, what came next was a sectarian bloodbath followed by another in Ras al-Nabaa, the next village along.

The attack on Baida came shortly after rebels had attacked a bus carrying pro-Assad militiamen, killing six.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, based in Britain, says at least 300 were killed in Baida and Ras al-Nabaa. Victims were buried in mass graves, activists say. Thousands fled.

The International Criminal Court in The Hague, which deals with war crimes, cannot investigate in Syria unless it receives a referral from the United Nations Security Council – something Russia and China have blocked.

The Syrian government has kept silent about Baida. But a Syrian intelligence officer, speaking anonymously, acknowledged that the perpetrators were government supporters, including some from the nearby villages.

Baida and Ras al-Nabaa had aligned themselves with the rebels, putting them in a precarious position amid their staunchly loyalist neighbours.

TODAY, like Ras al-Nabaa, Baida is a ghost town. Houses have been torched and hardly any women and only a few men remain. Tightly controlled by government security, the only way for a stranger to enter Baida is along a dirt road that snakes through the hills. This reporter – who must remain anonymous – made the journey to gather eyewitness testimony.

“I woke up to the sound of bullets before 7am,” Ahmad said. He fetched from another room his notebook, where he had meticulously recorded everything he saw.

Ahmad withheld his full name and public sector occupation for fear of reprisal.

“None of us knew what was happening. We couldn’t tell where the shells were falling,” he said, reading from his account.

His wife and children hid in the basement, and Ahmad went to his brother’s home, on the first floor of the family’s two- storey building. When the sound of gunfire kept getting closer, Ahmad’s mother urged her sons to hide.

Over the past two years, whenever government security forces raided the village, usually only men with suspected ties to rebels were arrested. Women and children were left alone. But this time, something made Ahmad hide, even though he had done nothing wrong. He went up to the attic, but his brother stayed put, arguing with their mother.

The list of victims included women and toddlers, the elderly and community leaders. Mohammad Taha, 90, was for decades the village shoemaker, even after he lost a leg in a car accident. There was Sheikh Omar Biyasi, 62, whose body Ahmad found alongside the sheikh’s slain wife and son, Hamzah, a medical student.

Sheikh Biyasi had been the village imam for 30 years. He was a government loyalist who alienated local people with his political views before resigning two years ago.

“Even though he always opposed the protests, they still killed him,” said Ahmad.

The Biyasi family suffered some of the worst losses, with 36 documented deaths. Ahmad found bodies belonging to the family in one small room; a mother and her three daughters and young son, who was at the local school with Ahmad’s children.

Before dark set in, Ahmad stumbled upon another chilling sight. Three charred bodies lay one on top of the other. “Smoke was still rising from one of them,” he said. One of them Ibrahim al-Shoghri, 69, who was mentally disabled.

THE bloodshed has left many Syrians wondering if the government is preparing for an Alawite state along the coast, home to the majority of the Shiite offshoot sect to which Assad and his clan belong.

One Alawite anti-government activist, who goes by the nom de guerre Sadeq, said it was unlikely Assad would establish a separate Alawite state, or homogenise it ethnically. But an autonomous region, something like Kurdistan, might be viable.

So far, there have been no direct clashes between rebels and government forces along the coast. Many Alawite villagers did not believe the rebels could make it to the mountains.