Were rebels the Hula perpetrators?

by Michael Wrase

Local eyewitnesses accuse Syrian rebels of having been involved in the massacre of Hula. However, only an independent inquiry into the atrocities might establish clarity.

At the massacre in Hula on 25 May at least 108 civilians were killed, among them many women and children. According to the opposition the perpetrators were President Assad’s Shabiha militias who “went murdering from house to house.” Meanwhile this view has been contradicted by several witnesses who – independently from one another – were interviewed by reporters of foreign media.

Proceeding in a “targeted” manner

They report consistently, that there had been “almost exclusively families of the Alawi and Shiite minority”, among the victims in Hula whose inhabitants are more than 90 percent Sunni. “Hence several dozen members of one family have been slaughtered who have converted from the Sunni to the Shiite Islam in recent years”, the Middle East correspondent for the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” (FAZ), Rainer Hermann, reported from Damascus that weekend. The reporter who has operated for over 20 years in the Middle East bases his report on opposition circles from the Homs region, who rejected the use of violence. According to their accounts, “the offenders filmed their victims, pretended they were Sunni victims and spread the videos via Internet.”

The Russian TV journalists Marat Musin and Olga Kulygina substantiate the version of the FAZ. According to their research the murder gangs were not at all going from house to house, but “proceeded in a targeted manner”. Two “well-off families were killed, who were considered traitors because they had never supported the rebels with donations.”

“Bald shaved men”

The list with the names of the dead which were spread widely by the opposition proves that most of the victims were members of he extended families Al-Sayed and Abdul Rasak. One of the sons of Sayed, the eleven-year old Ali Al-Sayed, survived the massacre because he pretended to be dead. In a report by the Associated Press Ali describes the attackers as “bald shaved men with long beards” – a description that applies to radical Islamist rebels rather than to Assad’s Shabiha militia.

But why should they kill their own people, Shiites and Alawis, the ‘Guardian’ also wonders, as to its research the few survivors of the massacre spoke with an “Alawi accent.”

The management of the monastery of Qara located south of Hula interviewed by the Dutch journalist Martin Jansen as well doubts the guilt of the Shabiba militia. It is said in a statement of the monastery, that the murdered people are victims of “an endless chain of violence and torture”, that above all people would fall victim, who refused to support the rebels. In a report published on 30 May the news agency Fides closely associated with the Vatican pointed out that among the victims of the escalating violence in the region of Homs there were “hundreds of Christians”. After the massacre of Hula they had left the region which is partly being controlled by the rebels, because they were afraid “of becoming persecuted as proteges of the Assad regime”.

Have tracks been blurred?

Only an independent investigation could determine who the real offenders of the massacre of Hula were. But it might be too late already. Because many of the traces of the recent atrocities in Syria are being systematically erased. •

^{Source: St. Galler Tagblatt, 12 June 2012
(Translation Current Concerns)}