Salon.com > Annasofie Flamand

Down and out in Damascus

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 13:53:00 +0000

DAMASCUS, Syria — On the first day of the feast time, Abu Omar and his family found themselves surrounded by olives.

“It’s so dangerous to spend nights in the open fields with little children, but what else can we do? We were forced out of our house,” he said.

Instead of relaxing at home — enjoying the Mediterranean’s favorite fruit to break the day-long Ramadan fast — Omar was taking shelter among the silver-leafed olive trees, having fled the battles in Syria’s capital for the relative safety of its surrounding countryside.

Fighting between Republican Guard soldiers and Syrian rebels reached new extremes in the capital over the weekend, as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad attempted to restore control after last week’s stunning assassination of four of his security chiefs.

The battles have forced many Syrians living in Damascus, including Omar and his wife and three children, to flee.

Syria’s sealed-off rebels

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 15:00:00 +0000

BABA AMR, Syria — For Syrians on both sides of the concrete wall that now surrounds this neighborhood, the comparisons to the region’s longest running conflict are unavoidable.

“When my wife described the wall to me I immediately thought of the wall built by the Israelis to isolate Palestinian villages and towns in the West Bank,” said Abu Annas, formerly a resident of Homs’ devastated Baba Amr district.

“I can understand that Israel built a wall to protect Israeli settlers from Palestinians. But I cannot understand how a national government builds a wall to separate its citizens from each other.”

Since forcing the retreat of rebel fighters from Baba Amr after a brutal month-long bombardment in February, government forces have constructed a massive concrete wall to seal off the former opposition stronghold.

A reporter for GlobalPost recently visited Baba Amr and the wall, describing it as up to 10-feet high and made of cement. It's still so new there is no graffiti. Since most residents have long fled, the neighborhood behind the wall has become “a dead land for cats and dogs,” as one former resident described it.

Syria’s tortured children

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 14:21:00 +0000

BEIRUT, Lebanon — For 13-year-old Hossam, the “ultimate pain” of his torture at the hands of the Syrian forces was when the “terrifying person” with the “huge body” wearing “black and black” drove a screwdriver up into his big toe nail before ripping it out with pliers.

“He was shouting at me, ‘You want freedom? You want to topple the regime?’ And he beat me. They asked me, ‘What is your name? What is your father’s name? Where are you from? Why did you join the protest?’ He showed me a video and said ‘Isn’t that you?’ I said no and he beat me. ‘Isn’t that you?’ No. He beat me. ‘Isn’t that you?’ Yes. He beat me more.”

In a regime whose systematic and widespread torture has shocked even hardened human rights researchers, Syrian children have been singled out for abuse, with hundreds reportedly tortured over the past year by the men fighting to keep President Bashar al-Assad and his family in power.

Assad’s surreal visit to Homs

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 14:59:00 +0000

BEIRUT, Lebanon — On Tuesday, just a few hours before President Bashar al-Assad arrived in Homs, the Syrian Army shelled the city. And they resumed bombing as soon as he left, activists said.

But briefly, during the president's visit — his first since Homs was devastated by fighting last month — a surreal bonhomie prevailed. Assad was greeted by a group of well-wishers, rounded up and organized by security forces, activists claimed. There were faithful pledges of “With you until death” and “Reconstruction is 90 percent complete.”

But away from the spectacle, Homs residents saw matters from an entirely different vantage point. One such perspective comes from Abu Hamza Sabouh (not his real name) a 23-year-old former math student, now a rebel fighter.

It was on a Syrian TV station with close ties to Assad that Abu Hamza first learned that 17 members of his extended family had been killed, and that his brigade was being blamed for the murder.

Syria’s looming threat of civil war

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 18:38:00 +0000

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Homs is now a war zone, a city under siege by the army of Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad. It is a city where rebel soldiers are being joined by jihadis to fight a guerrilla insurgency, and where once mixed communities have begun to split along religious lines as the seeds of a civil war take root.

"We're working by candlelight because there is no electricity and our generator is running out of fuel," a doctor known as Abdel Rizk from Homs' easterly Karm Zeitoun neighborhood told GlobalPost.

Trained as an anesthetist but lacking any serious painkillers, Abdel Rizk has morphed from a practitioner of the exact sciences into a battlefield surgeon of the most basic kind, completing multiple amputations in a day, using underwear to bandage wounds in the absence of gauze, and appealing desperately for help.

"We've got almost no medical supplies left," said the doctor, whose 15 patients, dying slowly in a single room of an old Syrian home, included two with serious chest wounds, five injured by mortars and three with amputated limbs.

Syria’s bloody turning point

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:57:00 +0000

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Abu Yaman used to work at the oil refinery in Homs, where production helped Syria maintain cheap subsidized heating oil and fuel, as well as free health care and 24-hour electricity.

Today, Abu Yaman’s refinery has become a military base, its main pipelines destroyed, state hospitals stormed by secret police, electricity cut and makeshift home clinics overwhelmed with casualties as Homs endures an onslaught of rockets and mortars in the regime’s worst massacre of civilians since the uprising began 11 months ago.

With rights group Avaaz reporting at least 258 people killed — including 72 children and 42 women — in a single night of shelling just hours before Russia and China vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning the government of President Bashar al-Assad, analysts warn the onslaught in Syria marks a new chapter in which further bloodshed appears inevitable.

Meet Syria’s rebel leader

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 15:41:00 +0000

In an interview with GlobalPost, the leader of the Free Syrian Army, Colonel Riad al-Asaad, denied fears that Syria is sliding into civil war after escalating attacks by his men against the Assad regime’ security forces.

And though short on weapons and ammunition, Col. Asaad — no relation to the ruling family — insisted his rebel army of defected soldiers would keep attacking the regime and protecting protesters. He also denied receiving support from regional players, and said there is no need for a new Benghazi in Syria.

GlobalPost: What is the Free Syrian Army and how many soldiers does it have?

Colonel Riad al-Assad: The Free Syrian Army is the army of the people, the army of the nation. It grew out of the Syrian army of the tyrant who is killing the people in Syria. The Free Syrian Army became organized three months ago, due to increasing defections from soldiers and officers. It now has divisions all over Syria, starting in Daraa [in the far south] and ending in Jisr Shughour [in the far northwest]. The number of soldiers in the Free Syrian Army now exceeds 10,000, and defections are increasing daily.

Inside Syria’s looming civil war

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 18:50:00 +0000

BEIRUT, Lebanon — There were more than 30 of them, defected soldiers storming the military base from all sides, following the orders of an officer who once served in President Bashar al-Assad’s army, but who has now led rebels in the most audacious attack on the regime’s forces since Syria’s uprising began.

The target, said two commanders of rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA) who spoke to GlobalPost from inside Syria, was symbolic: A base for Airforce Intelligence, feared by Syrians as the most notorious of the Assad’s regime’s 17 branches of security, at whose hands even children, among them 13-year-old Hamza al-Khateeb, have been tortured to death.

This branch of the police state was in Harasta, one of the restive suburbs of Damascus where repeated onslaughts by secret police, the military and armed thugs known as shabiha have failed to quell months of protests calling for an end to the Assad family’s 41-year dictatorship.

Palestinians turn against Syrian regime

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 16:22:00 +0000

BEIRUT, Lebanon -- While stripped of their nationality in Jordan and living in Lebanon in the worst socio-economic conditions of any in their community, Palestinian refugees in Syria have long enjoyed comparably better circumstances, including equal rights with citizens.

But in a development that challenges a central pillar of the Syrian regime's legitimacy, Palestinians in Syria are beginning to turn against a dictatorship that for decades used its claims of resisting Israel and fighting for Palestinian rights as justification for the repression of its own people.

"We will not accept to be a bargaining chip for the Syrian regime," said Abu Ammar, 50, a Palestinian refugee living in Yarmouk, a poor southern suburb of Damascus and the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Syria.