Survivor tells of horrific carnage in Syrian village

A man who says his six siblings and his mother were slaughtered in what activists have described as a massacre of over 78 people in the central Syrian provincial Mazraat al-Qubair, outside Hama, has described a harrowing phone call with his dying brother. “He told me he was trying to get out, but couldn’t,” the 30-year-old farmer, who identified himself with the pseudonym “Leith,” told the The Daily Star via telephone. Communications were cut, Leith said, but when he reached his younger brother again, “he told me the Shabbiha had cut off his hand.” “He was clearly struggling, then I didn’t hear anything. That’s when I think he died.” Leith said he watched anxiously from a nearby village, Karm al-Zeytoun, as Syrian armed forces and Shabbiha militiamen armed with knives, guns and clubs entered Qubair on four fronts, after a two-hour shelling attack on the town that began at around 2:30 p.m. Thursday. “They entered the town on four different fronts: Al-Majdal from the east, Maarzaf from the north, and Al-Tuwain and Aqila from the West,” he said. When the army withdrew after several hours, Leith said he and others were able to enter the village at around 8:30 p.m. to be confronted with horrific scenes. “We could smell the burning bodies,” he said. “I went to [my family] house ... it was all burned. We started pulling the corpses from the house. All of them were mutilated, cut with knives. There were bodies of children and women everywhere,” he said. Leith said two of his family members, including his brother, were unaccounted for, adding that he believed some 40 victims had been taken by Shabbiha militiamen to the nearby Alawite village of Aseela. Reports of the massacre, on the eve of a crucial briefing to the U.N. Security Council by international envoy Kofi Annan on the fate of his beleaguered peace plan for Syria, shocked the international community, prompting international condemnation. The massacre follows another in Houla, near central Homs on May 25, in which 108 people, more than half of them children, were killed. The United Nations is investigating that massacre, believed to have been at least partially committed by pro-Assad militiamen. Syria denies any role in that attack and Thursday denied reports of the killings in Qubair, saying security forces had confronted “terrorists” who killed nine women and children. Leith said he and others made desperate calls to the U.N. monitoring teams to document the attacks. “We kept calling and calling and they kept saying ‘half an hour,’” Leith recounted. “When we finally saw vans coming in, we thought it was the monitors ... but then we realized that it was actually Addounia TV [Syrian State Television],” he said. He pleaded with the world’s media to tell the international community of Qubair’s plight, saying: “We need international intervention.” The United Nations monitoring team confirmed Thursday that they had been unable to access the area, adding that they would try again Friday. Addounia television published images of the village with testimony from “residents” claiming armed terrorists had attacked the village. Leith’s own claims could not be independently verified, but tallied with other accounts of activists in the area and human rights groups investigating the incident. Some activists said anti-government insurgents had been operating in areas near the village, home to about 150 people who may have been targeted in revenge or as collective punishment. But most said Qubair, a predominantly Sunni hamlet, had never joined the revolt against Syrian President Bashar Assad’s rule. Leith said all those responsible were from nearby Alawite villages.