The Hula Massacre is a turning point in the Syrian conflict

by Rainer Hermann

The Hula massacre is a turning point in the Syrian conflict. Based on UN observers, the Western public blames the Syrian army. There are reports from eye witnesses that doubt this version. According to them, the civilians were killed by Sunni rebels.

The Hula massacre was a turning point in the Syrian drama. There was a huge global outcry when on 25 May 108 people were killed, among them 45 children.

Requests for a military intervention to stop the bloodshed were heard and violence has been escalating in Syria ever since. Based on Arabic news stations and the visit of UN monitors on the following day, the world public opinion almost unanimously blamed the massacre on the regular Syrian army and their close allies, the Shabiha militia.

Last week [7 June], the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” (FAZ) challenged that version on the basis of eyewitness reports. It reported that the killed civilians had been Alawis and Shias. They were killed purposefully by armed Sunnis in Taldou, a city in the Hula plane, while there was heavy fighting around the town and roadblocks between the regular army and units of the Free Syrian Army. Many media worldwide have since then commented on this report, most of them discarding it as not trustworthy. Hence there are four questions: Why has the world public opinion followed a different version up to now? Why does the context of the civil war make the FAZ version plausible? Why are the witnesses trustworthy? Which further facts support their version?

Firstly, why has the world public opinion followed a different version? Undoubtedly, all atrocities committed in the first months of the conflict, while the opposition did not have any weapons and was defenseless, have to be blamed on the regime. Hence it was a plausible assumption that this would continue. Additionally, the Syrian state media have no credibility. Since the beginning of the conflict, they have repetitively been using formulas like “armed terror groups”. That is why nobody believes them when this is really the case. The news stations Al-Jazeera and al-Arabia have become the leading media, however. They belong to Qatar and Saudi Arabia, two states actively involved in the conflict. For good reasons, we know the saying: “In war, truth is the first casualty”.

Secondly, why does the context of the civil war make the FAZ version plausible? In the past months, many weapons were smuggled into Syria; for a long time, the rebels make use of moderately heavy weapons. In Syria, more than 100 people have been killed every week; the deaths of both sides are balanced. The militia fighting under the banner of the Free Syrian Army controls a large part of the provinces of Homs and Idlib and is expanding their rule over large parts of the country. The increasing lawlessness has led to a wave of criminal abductions; it has also allowed to settle old scores. Whoever looks around in Facebook or talks to Syrians: Everybody knows stories of “confessional cleansings” – of people having been killed just because they were Alawis or Sunnis.

The plane of Hula, mostly inhabited by Sunni, situated between the Sunni Homs and the mountains of the Alawis has seen a long history of confessional tensions. The massacre has occurred in Taldou, one of the largest towns in Hula. The names of the 84 civilians are known. They are the fathers, mothers and 49 children of the al Sajjid family and two branches of the Abdarrazzaq family. Locals said that the killed were Alawis and Muslims who had converted from Sunni to Shia Islam. Only a few kilometers from the Lebanon border, this makes them suspicious to be sympathizers of the Hezbollah which is hated among the Sunnis. In addition, relatives of the member of parliament Abdalmuti Mashlab, who has been faithful to the regime, were among the murdered.

The apartments of the three families are in different parts of Taldou. The members of the families were killed in a targeted manner with only one exception. No neighbor was even hurt. Knowledge of the place was indispensable for these well-planned “executions”. The news agency AP cited the only survivor of the al Sajjid family, eleven-year-old Ali: “the killers had shaved their heads and wore long beards”. This is what fanatic Jihadists look like, not the Shabiha militia. The boy had survived because he had feigned death and smeared himself with his mother’s blood, he said.

Sunni Rebels pursue the “liquidation” of all minorities

As early as 1 April the nun Agnés-Maryam of the Jacob monastery (“Deir Mar Yakub”) south of Homs in the town Qara described the climate of violence and fear in the region in a long letter. She concluded that the Sunni rebels were pursuing a stepwise liquidation of all minorities; In her letter she describes the expulsion of Christians and Alawis from their homes as they were occupied by the rebels and the raping of girls who were handed over to the rebels as “war booty”; she was an eye witness when in the Wadi Sajjeh road rebels killed a merchant refusing to close his shop with a car bomb and then, in front of an Al-Jazeera camera, the same rebels claimed that this deed had been committed by the regime. And finally she described how, in the Khalidijah quarter of Homs, Sunni rebels had locked Alawi and Christian hostages into a house, blew it up only to declare later that this had been another atrocity committed by the regime.

Why should the Syrian eyewitnesses be considered credible? Because they belong to none of the parties in the conflict but stand in between the battle lines and have no interest other than trying to prevent a further escalation of violence. Several of these persons have already been killed by now. Hence nobody wants to reveal his or her identity. But there can be no certainty about all details at a time when there is no chance to double-check all facts on site. Even if the Hula massacre did happen as described above, we cannot draw any conclusions for other massacres. As was the case in the Kosovo war, each massacre has to be investigated independently.

What are further facts supporting the above reported version? The FAZ was not the first to report a new version of the Hula massacre. The other reports could simply not stand their ground against the big media. The Russian journalist Marat Musin who works for the small news agency Anna had been in Hula on the 25 and 26 May, had been partially an eyewitness and had published the testimonies of other eyewitnesses. In addition, the Dutch Arabist and free journalist Martin Janssen had contacted the Jacobs monastery in Qara where many victims had been accommodated and where the nuns do humanitarian work in a selfless manner.

Rebels present their version of the massacre to UN observers

To him the nuns described how more than 700 armed rebels, coming from Rastan, had overrun an army roadblock before Taldou, how they had piled up the bodies of the dead soldiers and civilians in front of the mosque and how, posing in front of a media station’s cameras sympathizing with the rebels, they had presented to the UN observers their version of the alleged massacre committed by the Syrian army. The very next day, UN General Secretary Ban Ki-Moon reported to the UN Security Council that the detailed circumstances remained unclear. But the UN could confirm that “there had been fire from artillery and grenades. There had also been other forms of violence including shots from closest distance and serious abuses.”

This progression of events can be reconstructed: After the Friday prayer on May 25, more than 700 armed men under the leadership of Abdurrazzaq Tlass and Yahya Yusuf attacked – coming in three groups from Rastan, Kafr Laha and Akraba – three army roadblocks around Taldou. The rebels outnumbering the soldiers (most of them also Sunni) engaged them in a bloody battle, killing two dozen soldiers, most of them conscripts. During and after the fighting the rebels executed the families al Sajjid and Abdarrazzaq. They had refused to join the opposition.     •

^{Source: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 13 June 2012, © all rights reserved by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung GmbH, Frankfurt. Provided by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Archive.
(Translation Current Concerns)}