DAMASCUS, Syria (Washington Insider Magazine) – This is the story of a major war crime committed by unit 227 of Syria’s military intelligence agency, one of the regime’s most fearsome enforcers. A massacre was perpetrated in the southern outskirts of Damascus in April 2013, according to recently released video acquired by the Guardian. Groups of people were picked up, blindfolded, shackled, and marched into an execution pit unknowing that they were about to be shot in the head.
The video was shaky at first, but it eventually settled in on a newly excavated pit on the ground between 2 bullet-pocked building shells. In the footage we see an intelligence official in military uniform and a fishing hat sitting near the hole’s edge, wielding an assault rifle and shouting orders.
A blinded man was led by the arm and urged to run towards the massive hole ahead of him, which he had no idea existed. He hadn’t counted on bullets slamming into his writhing body as he collapsed upon a pile of dead people beneath him. More unwitting inmates arrived one by one; a few were persuaded they were fleeing a nearby sniper, while others were humiliated and tormented in their final moments. Many others seemed to feel that their assailants were guiding them to safety.
At the time of the execution, at least 41 men were buried in a mass grave in the Damascus area of Tadamon, which was a battleground in the struggle between the Syrian leadership and insurgents aligned against him. The killers splashed fuel on the corpses and burned them beside stacked piles of soil that would eventually be used to complete the job, laughing as they actually sealed up a war atrocity just a few kilometers from Syria’s center of power. The video was recorded on April 16, 2013.
Syria’s security forces learnt the tactics of intimidation from Soviet and Stasi soldiers in the 1960s. Terror has been the regime’s most effective tool for clinging to power, and it employed whatever means at its disposal to implant it. In this instance, the casualties were citizens who were neutral and had embraced Assad’s protection rather than insurgents. Their assassinations were largely viewed as a warning to the entire suburb of Tadamon.
Tadamon is now a busy district of the capital that appears to have been spared from the horrors of war. Buildings and parking areas have covered most of the devastation and horrors of the war.
