'No humanity left' in Syria
By Cal Perry in
on April 24th, 2011.
Every other journalist is trying to get into Syria, but on Saturday I was
trying to get out. The government had made it perfectly clear: My visa was
expiring and unless I left on April 23, I would "face the full force of the
law".
I had agreed the night before with my cameraman, Ben Mitchell, over a drink
that neither of us wanted to discover what "full force of the law" meant. So
the debate was really whether I should fly out from Damascus or drive to Amman,
Jordan, and fly from there.
The decision was made that he would fly out from Damascus, the Syrian capital,
with the gear and I would drive to Amman. I had left my second passport there
with a friend. One for Arab countries and the other for Israel. Welcome to 21st
century diplomatic relations.
I decided to wait until after noon prayers before setting out south to the
border. If the roads were going to be blocked with various pieces of burning
detritus, as they had the day before, I wanted to know first. It's about 125km
from Damascus to the Jordanian border - a drive that should only take an hour
or so, especially with the way Syrian drivers tend to step on the gas.
I was in a really bad mood on this particular morning as I was by default being
expelled from the country. I said very little to the driver as we set out,
which is unusual for me. I've been grilled in the old school style of
journalism: I can still hear the voice of one of my mentors saying "eyes and
ears Mr Perry ... eyes and ears".
The only two questions I asked my driver as we left Damascus were his name, and
where he was from. "Abdel
from Daraa," he told me.
"Beautiful city," I responded.
Truth was: I didn't know if it was beautiful or not. It was less than four
weeks ago when I tried to access the city (which lies right against the
Jordanian border in the South) and was turned back by the army. It was my first
week in Syria when we tried to cover the initial protests in Daraa. I remember
coming across that army checkpoint and two machine-gun positions had been
"pre-sighted".
'Kill zone'
An old military technique that I learned from the US Marine Corps about after
years in Iraq: Soldiers will simply take two posts, put them at approximately
"two o'clock and ten o'clock" as your eyes would scan the horizon: a certain
distance out - fire off a few rounds until you hit the post. Then mark that
spot on the machine guns sightings - and just like that ... you've got yourself
a "pre-sighted kill zone".
A kill zone. The name says it all. US marines have a particular knack for
naming things that describe exactly what they really are.
I knew that day, seeing those posts and that "kill zone" that the government
was taking these small demonstrations (at the time) very seriously. Syria up
until these past five weeks had been a quiet country, while the rest of the
region seemed to continue to burn.
Of course it became clear the day before, on April the 22nd, that the
government would no longer stand for the type of dissent that had spread: clear
opposition to the regime. Over a hundred people were killed across the country
on a bloody Friday, the bloodiest since the protests began.
I tried to get out of the hotel and around the country as best I could
throughout my month there. But as I told a colleague: "I don't blend in really
well - and this government is rounding up journalists."
It was really that, and a few bad incidents I had come across while trying to
get out and about. Be it my camera being wrested away from me outside the main
mosque in Damascus or my drive through the neighbourhood of Barza in Damascus
the previous week.
Barzah: A bad neighbourhood to begin with ... it had gone from bad to worse the
Friday I decided to drive through and take a look. Men with metal pipes were in
the middle of the street beating people.
At least a dozen walking wounded were headed away from the main mosque there,
some bleeding from the head; others had their hands bandaged. Clearly there had
been a hand-to-hand brutal battle. Ambulances raced away from the scene - and
each time I would have the driver circle back they would wave the pipes as if
to say: "We dare you to get out of that car."
Gunfire raining into crowd
My grumpy attitude, Abdel [the driver] and I were approaching the city of Izraa
when something immediately clearly horrible was unfolding down the road
directly in front of us. People, mostly truck drivers, were standing on the
highway ... yelling at the cars approaching - telling them to pull over.
Screaming and waving widely. I saw one making signs with his hands. He was
mimicking the motion of a machine gun firing. I got my bearings, noticing right
away two road signs: one pointing to the right that read "Izraa: 1km" and the
other pointing to the left that read "Daraa".
It dawned on me at that moment that I had been here before. We were just
outside the "kill zone" I had seen weeks earlier on the outskirts of Daraa.
About 50 metres from where we pulled over was an overpass that connected Daraa
to Izraa. I could see clearly a crowd of people marching from my left to my
right over the bridge.
Suddenly gunfire rained into the crowd. The truck drivers dove for cover. And,
for what seemed like an eternity, I sat there in the car, stunned and frozen.
People were falling on top of each other, being cut down like weeds in a field
by what I think must have been a mix of both small arms fire and machine gun
fire. I saw at least two children shot. They fell immediately. People were
screaming. Gunfire rattled on.
Two cars tried to gun it under the overpass and continue down the highway, even
with the gunfire continuing to cut people up. One of the cars got hit
immediately before it passed under the bridge and ended up slamming into the
embankment on the right side of the road. Someone fell out of the passenger
side and scrambled under the bridge and crawled into a ball ... just hoping for
survival, I suppose.
I've been playing it through over and over again in my head for the past 16
hours and I still do not know where the gunfire was coming from. It seemed to
be coming from a field that lay off to my right - on the Izraa side of the
bridge. I could see some muzzle flashes, but I've never in my life seen people
walking, and just shot at indiscriminately.
I could not take my eyes off what was quickly becoming carnage. One of the last
things I remember seeing clearly were people lying flat on the road, taking
cover behind those who had already been wounded or shot dead ... lying in what
must have been pools of blood to avoid a hail of flying hot hell.
Abdel's brain finally switched back on and he flung the car into reverse and
headed backwards down the highway, laying on his car horn the entire time,
weaving backwards through the cars that were now slowly approaching the spot
where truck drivers were taking cover in the ditch. I was gripping the handle
of the door so hard, I noticed my knuckles had gone totally white.
Mini-massacre
Abdel spun the car around, drove over the median and started driving back to
Damascus. There was really nothing to say at that point. But out of immediate
instinct, I rang our news desk in Doha. I can't remember what I said initially,
but clearly it was enough for the editors to get an anchor up immediately to
tape an interview over the phone, getting my fresh reaction to what I had seen.
I didn't know what to say honestly except it was clear security forces [or
Assad loyalists, who are now, based on behaviour, part of the security forces]
had just carried out a mini-massacre. I'm sure I repeated myself too many
times, something you try not to do ... but this was unlike anything I had ever
seen. After covering seven separate wars in as many years, I've never seen
people march directly into a hail of gunfire.
As the interview was rapping up, we came across a heavy army checkpoint. We had
driven through maybe a dozen on our way down, and the further we headed south,
the more frequent they became. It was as if around 25km north of the Jordan
border there was an invisible military zone that had been put up.
I didn't notice the ones on the other side of the highway, but as soon as we
started approaching one (now driving back north), Abdel and I looked at each
other. Immediately I apologised to Tony Harris [our anchor] and shoved the
phone into my pocket, bringing a quick end to the interview.
Being seen talking on the phone as a journalist, right after fleeing that
scene, we would have ended up in detention, there is not a doubt in my mind.
As we passed through the army checkpoint, the soldiers were smoking and
laughing; looking at each other; smiling, waving us through various barriers. I
can only describe it like what it felt to me: an evil grimace of enjoyment was
on their faces. We were maybe, at the most, 3km from where I had just seen
people cut down, bullets tearing their bodies into pieces. It was disgusting.
I turned to look at Abdel, to begin asking him a series of questions about the
best way to proceed from that point on - and I saw a man of maybe 40 years old
with a single tear running down his cheek. "Are you ok, habbibi," I asked like
an idiot.
"Yes ... yes - but shou (what)
shou," he repeated
what do we have? There is
no humanity here anymore."
'No humanity left'
After a few minutes of silence and many cigarettes passed back and forth we
debated the best way for me to get out of the country. We debated it all the
way back to Damascus.
In the end, Abdel and I agreed: make a run for the Lebanese border now,
spending another night in Damascus; overstaying my visa to face the "full force
of the law" after reporting what we had both just seen was not a smart idea.
So, off to the Lebanese capital Beirut we went.
Ironic that a place where I've seen a war and many clashes break out before was
suddenly a seven-hour refugee for me as I waited for the first flight to any
European city so I could then connect home to see my elderly and sick
grandfather on Easter.
As I sit at this airport in Paris, writing this piece, watching people come and
go, I am haunted by two thoughts: The first is a question I cannot answer. How
can you shoot people like that? Just watch a crowd march towards you; sit in a
firing position, wait ... watch; then fire directly into a crowd of civilians.
I did not see a single shot fired from the crowd in the few minutes we sat
there watching people flail without any place to hide - a gut wrenching pink
mist spraying strait in the air.
It is that thought, and the words of a young man from the southern city of
Daraa speaking about the country he once loved, a country that has forever
changed asking me rhetorically: "What do we have? There is no humanity here
anymore."
------------------------------------
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