Before you start reading I have to mention that this text contains descriptions of very graphic events. Continue to read only if you're emotionally strong enough and old enough to sustain it.
After a tremendous Saturday joining the Syrian community here in Munich to protest against the cruelties and the lost legitimation of the Assad regime I switched on my Twitter account Sunday noon, still in a deeply emphatized mood. The last news I had in my memory were about Deir Ezzor and the defected soldiers protecting the bastion of the Syrian Kurds. My concerns about a possible act of violence from the regime side were still there but I had somehow that strong feeling the Assad government wouldn't react at all because of the growing awareness outside the country.
I'd never expected an incident like the one taking place.
The first word I read in the timeline was the hash tag 'Hamamassacre'. For a moment I thought about the 1982 genocide the Hama had to sustain. But further tweets seemed to confirm a new regime assault on the city famous for his watermills. One day before the beginning of Ramadan a nightmare became true. First videos were circulating, showing smoke upon the roofs. Counted killings varied between 50 and 100, the estimated number of unreported cases might be much more higher. Snipers had taken place on the rooftops shooting on everyone in the streets and houses. Bodies were lying around, it was nearly impossible to recover them without being shot.
A bloody Sunday took its course ..
The tweeps were very careful spreading the mobile phone videos, nearly all showing bleeding or dead people were labeled 'graphic'. Here I have to admit that I can bear some of them without becoming nightmares or else, means not that I am hard-boiled as well but I've seen so many of those footages during the last months that I could be no more shocked. I'm admiring the really courageous people thinking in the first moment they realize a strong bleeding human being to help him immediately. Should be normal, unfortunately isn't. One tweet made me curious: reading the question 'what kind of ammunition caused this?' I clicked on the link and became something to see I've never seen before in my life ..
People were running to a body lying on the street who had no head anymore. Only a fragment of his face remained hanging on the neck. They covered him and brought him away, running in fear being themselves hidden by a bullet.
Without doubt a new peak of extraordinary violence. The shootings came from a far distance which meant the regime killers used a special caliber this time to damage the body biggest possible. I was wondering if it could be international outlawed ammunition what would have been another topic for the bill of indictment against Assad and his followers. Later on further tweets were mentioning more bodies without heads or giant wounds in their torsos. The regime language here spoken reminded me on Maher Assad, a cold-blooded angel of death whom I first saw in a leaked video from last year's crackdown of a prisoners' uprising. Without any emotion he walked through the ruins and took photos of the spread body parts with his mobile phone. Another short movie showing a man whose leg was rolled over by a tank and different reports about nail bombs thrown at the protesters seemed to confirm my theory: explicit sadism by the security forces, Maher's handwriting.
The first article in an online newspaper mentioning exactly the same disturbing footage I saw today was from Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlanic. Short and precise he described the final decline of 'Vogue man-of-the-year' Bashar al-Assad (what he supposedly wasn't, his wife Asma being always in the focus of the international glamour press):
In the meantime the Syrian tweep community complained in their grief and frustration about the lack of concrete actions of the world's leading governments. Comprehensible. I began to surf through the sites of our German news agencies. To my great surprise I found on nearly everyone the headline about the today's Hama tragedy, commented with disgrace, tagged with pictures and mobile phone videos and - in my eyes most important of all - related to the 1982 massacre which was more or less silenced for nearly 30 years. A small victory in the informational war. Bashar al-Assad wanted to crackdown the continuing protests against him making an example of but all he reached was the growing international awareness digging out the mass murdering his father was responsible for. A look in the online editions of foreign newspapers confirmed the tendency which could possibly lead to necessary clear sanctions against the Syrian regime and fasten the leaving of the most hated dynasty in the Middle East.
Nobody can predict what the regime will be capable of committing against their own people. That is the horrible aspect of the ongoing. But the attention is slowly rising up to irreversible dimensions. And that is the more than hopeful aspect.
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