WHEN the shelling started at Houla, Abu Firas Razak told his wife to take their six children to a room at the back of the house where they would be safe.
Fearing arrest if the security forces bombarding the village moved in on the ground, he left his family and hid in an olive grove nearby. He thought he would be home within a few hours, in time to put the children to bed.
Instead he watched as men in military fatigues, some wearing trainers, stormed the row of houses where his immediate family and many other relatives were sheltering.
“One of them was holding a machete,” he said. “I saw them dragging my cousins out of their house with their hands behind their backs — I thought they were being arrested. Then they shot them dead, right there in the street.”
The killing continued for nearly 20 minutes before Razak returned home, dreading what he would find.
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“My wife and children were lying on the floor, covered with blood,” he said. “My five-month-old daughter had been shot in the head and my disabled 10-year-old son was stabbed in the head with the machete.” He collapsed unconscious at the sight.
Razak’s family were buried in a mass grave last week with more than 100 other victims of a massacre described by Kofi Annan, the peace envoy of the UN and Arab League, as a tipping point.
Survivors said shabiha — militiamen working for the Alawite-dominated regime — had poured into Houla to carry out an indiscriminate slaughter of predominantly Sunni villagers.
Others suggested that the murder of children was more in keeping with Al-Qaeda sympathisers who might have been trying to provoke sectarian conflict. However, the regime’s attempts to blame the massacre on “armed terrorist gangs” was condemned as a blatant lie by Susan Rice, America’s ambassador to the UN.
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Whatever the claims and counter-claims, concern was growing on all sides this weekend that a vicious sectarian conflict was already under way and could escalate into civil war in one of the most strategically sensitive countries in the Middle East.
Annan said yesterday: “The spectre of an all-out war with an alarming sectarian dimension grows by the day.”
The warning signs have been there for months. While the focus of international attention has been on the shooting of unarmed protesters and the shelling of civilian areas by the army of President Bashar al-Assad, the opposition has retaliated with a ruthlessness of its own.
The latest example comes in a YouTube video showing an apparent attack by rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA) on two tanks at a checkpoint in the western city of Homs last Wednesday.
To shouts of “get out, get out”, a soldier emerges from his turret and puts his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “How many of you are there?” a man shouts repeatedly as the soldier is shoved from the tank.
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“Only me,” he answers.
“Where is your gun?”
“I don’t have one.”
“You mother ******, you brother of a whore, you’re a soldier ... take him away, take him away,” the man shouts.
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Shortly afterwards, the camera pans to a soldier lying behind the tanks, his body ripped open from head to hip by gunfire as his assailants rifle through his pockets.
What has alarmed even pro-FSA activists is a series of sectarian attacks by Sunni gangs on Alawite civilians.
One activist said members of the Abu Issa rebel group in Taftanaz, Idlib, in northern Syria, told him they had kidnapped a group of government employees and tortured three of them to death.
An Alawite resident of Homs described how an armed gang had abducted his elderly parents. They demanded a ransom, which he said he would pay, but the parents were killed anyway the following day, he said.
A Human Rights Watch report in March said certain attacks by opposition groups “were motivated by anti-Shi’ite or anti-Alawite sentiments”.
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A Syrian opposition Facebook page entitled “We don’t want freedom any more, we want to burn the Alawite dogs” is but one sign of the inflamed sectarian tensions.
Some in Houla believe these tensions help to explain the massacre. An independent source claimed yesterday that 300 armed Sunnis had attacked the Alawite village of Al Shomeria, west of Homs, on May 24, murdering up to 12 civilians. The source said the shabiha’s massacre in Houla the following night was a revenge killing.
On May 25, activists say, soldiers dispersed a crowd of protesters with gunfire at a checkpoint. Rebels attacked the checkpoint, destroying an armoured personnel carrier. The military responded by bombarding the town with tank and artillery fire.
Hundreds of shabiha, many in white pick-up trucks, then smashed their way in, hunting for FSA fighters, witnesses said.
A man who said his wife’s three nephews had been murdered told The Sunday Times how the shabiha — “big, fit, bold men with long beards carrying Kalashnikovs and dressed in military trousers” — had arrived with a military escort.
“I will never forget how the shabiha were killing and shouting ‘We took revenge’,” said the witness, who identified himself only as Abu Amid. “They were phoning and shouting on their phones, ‘Oh my relatives, we took revenge on them’.”
An elderly woman described how her husband, aged 60, had told her to hide in their cows’ straw before he opened the door. He was shot in the stomach, but survived. “They were shouting and laughing as if they were hunting birds,” she said of the shabiha.
When they left, the witnesses said, men, women and children were found shot at close range or stabbed with sharp tools or knives.
The Syrian government tells a different story. It claims the attacks fitted a pattern of activity by armed groups prior to UN security council sessions on Syria. In this case, officials said, it coincided with Annan’s pre-announced visit.
Annan joined a chorus of condemnation by UN and government officials from America to the Arab world.
Others questioned whether the government was behind the outrage. Alastair Crooke, a former British intelligence officer and EU adviser now based in Beirut, believes the level of brutality implicates Syrian elements associated with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which conducted similar operations in Anbar province, west of Baghdad, during the Iraq war.
“It smells of Anbar and those close to Zarqawi,” he said. “Although it is a very open issue, it is almost certainly not the military forces or elements of the regime.”
Could Islamists hell-bent on provoking civil war have been responsible for some of the atrocities of recent months? More than 300 militants trained in camps in Lebanon are said to have slipped over the border to join the fight against Assad, and there are growing reports of foreign infiltration.
Arms are flowing from Qatar and Saudi Arabia to strengthen the FSA, which has turned to guerrilla warfare after being driven from its strongholds.
The violence that has claimed between 9,000 and 13,000 lives is intensifying.
On Wednesday 13 bound corpses, many apparently shot execution-style, were discovered in Deir ez-Zor province in the east of the country.
On Friday the bodies of a dozen workers at a government-run fertiliser plant were found dumped near Al-Qusair in the west. Some appeared to have been shot in the head, others shot or stabbed in the body. Their clothes were drenched in blood.
Early reports suggested that shabiha had ordered the men off a bus, made them raise their arms and praise Assad, then opened fire. A pro-government group said the men had been killed by rebels because they worked in a state-run factory.
Yesterday rebels were reported to have killed six soldiers in the province of Dera’a and eight others on the outskirts of Damascus, the capital.
International frustration is growing with failure to observe Annan’s peace plan, even though both the government and the rebels have endorsed it. “It’s the only game in town,” said Ahmad Fawzi, Annan’s spokesman.
Qatar urged Annan yesterday to set a time frame for his mission and for the UN security council to permit military intervention. Fawzi cautioned that further militarisation of the situation could be “catastrophic”.
Although senior figures in America emphasised that military action could not be ruled out, Leon Panetta, the defence secretary, said he did not envisage it without UN authorisation — unthinkable as long as Russia and China support Assad on the security council.
The danger that conflict in Syria may spill over into neighbouring countries was highlighted yesterday when pro- and anti-Assad factions clashed in the Lebanese city of Tripoli. Seven people were killed.
Ali Larijani, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, has warned that western military intervention in Syria would trigger an attack on Israel.
A prominent Syrian activist said he saw only trouble ahead in a spiral of “radicalisation, hatred and revenge”.The arrival of Islamic fundamentalist militants had increased the risk of civil war, said the activist, who asked not to be named. “If it is not controlled, it will become monstrous.”
Additional reporting: Sara Hashash and Uzi Mahnaimi
Egypt has its justice — now for Assad of Syria, Editorial
HOW THE WORLD COULD ACT
Bolster Kofi Annan peace plan
For: Bumping up UN monitors from fewer than 300 to several thousand could boost chances of curbing violence.
Against: Monitors have been ineffective in efforts to secure ceasefire.
Arm the opposition
For: Might protect civilians and deter Syrian security forces.
Against: No control over how weapons are used or by which factions. Might encourage slide into all-out civil war.
Humanitarian corridors
For: Havens near borders with Turkey and Jordan could mean vital aid for casualties and refugees.
Against: Foreign forces guarding them could be drawn into conflict.
'Yemen' solution
For: US plan for Assad to give way to vice-president could mirror Yemen transition.
Against: Syria is not Yemen. Assad looks secure. Allies have little interest in forcing him out.
Military intervention
For: Airstrikes could constrain security forces and hasten fall of Assad.
Against: Strong air defences. Risk of regional conflict: allies in Iran have threatened retaliatory strikes against Israel.
Tougher sanctions
For: Low-risk, long-term strategy to weaken regime and avoid accusation that the West is doing nothing.
Against: Everyone will accuse the West of doing nothing.
Lucy Fisher