Their wounded were shot and their dead defiled. The Free Syrian Army rebels in Idlib knew better than to expect mercy. But accounts from men who escaped the city as it fell to the Syrian Army last week describe atrocities that suggest a new benchmark in brutality by a regime that has already lost its moral legitimacy.
Majid, 25, an air conditioning engineer who was crouching with his Kalashnikov behind a barricade on Ibn Sina Hospital Street in western Idlib last Sunday, saw comrades knocked down by the blast of a tank shell at the Nahle roundabout.
“Some were still alive but there was nothing we could do to help them,” he said yesterday in Turkey, still clutching the binoculars through which he watched their fate. “We couldn’t get near them to help as we had only Kalashnikovs against the advancing tanks. We could only watch.”
Majid and his small band of rebels, including teachers, lawyers, a butcher, a carpenter and a painter, saw a tank with troops. “Then I saw the soldiers moving among the dead and wounded. Some soldiers stopped to piss on the casualties. Afterwards they walked around finishing off the wounded.”
It was just after 8am on the second day of the Syrian Army’s operation to seize Idlib, a city in the northwest. Already Idlib was in chaos as ill-equipped FSA fighters, some hiding behind piles of loose sand they had dumped in the streets for cover, broke under shellfire, falling back towards the city centre.
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Speaking to The Times at length in a house in southwestern Turkey used by recuperating rebels, Majid was quite clear as to what happened next.
“I saw the soldiers pull eight bodies from the roundabout on to the road,” he said. “They laid them in a row and then drove a column of five armoured vehicles over their bodies — two tanks, a Shilka anti-aircraft vehicle and two armoured personnel carriers. I counted the bodies and I counted the vehicles that crushed them.” He had little time for horror. A tank shell wiped out his group, wounding him in the knee.
“There wasn’t time to think. Three of us were dead, another two severely wounded and 11 hit, including me. We were slung on the back of a pick-up and withdrew to the city centre.”
Outgunned, outnumbered, out-manoeuvred: that is Majid’s account of the final hours of resistance in Idlib. Since its capture last week, the city has been sealed and searched for opposition suspects. He describes a desperate struggle by small bands of ill-armed civilians against a merciless enemy.
“I wouldn’t describe us as well-organised,” said Eiad Abu Bakr, another FSA survivor of that day. “Of my group of about 20 fighters only four of us survived Sunday. We had 70 bullets each and just one RPG between us with four rockets. Two of those didn’t work. I never even got to fire my rifle. What use could it be against tanks?”
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Hiding in an olive grove, Eiad saw jeering Syrian troops strip the body of one his dead comrades, Abu Khaled al Bahri, and throw it into a skip. “His wasn’t the only body ... but his was the one I recognised.”
Escapers from Idlib have regrouped in Turkey and already some cross the border nightly to fight. They do not regard their battle as over. But their sense of abandonment by the outside world is overwhelming.
One said: “You have organisations in the West which defend the rights of animals better than ours.”