Khalid Amayreh
AhramOnline
Assad's regime of torture: In addition to military sieges
and assaults in Syrian cities, those critical of the regime
face the possibility of imprisonment and rampant torture.
Hair-raising reports that keep coming out from Syria speak of the Syrian army, whose raison d’etre is to protect the country from external aggression, ganging up on Syrian population centers one after the other, using T-72 tanks, helicopter gunships and other lethal weaponry that would be used in real war between armies.
Hundreds if not thousands of innocent civilians have been riddled with bullets, children tortured in barbarian gangland style before they are handed over to their respective families for a hasty burial, and women raped by soldiers in order to deter male relatives from taking part in pro-democracy protests against the tyrannical regime in Damascus.
Interestingly, the bulk of this campaign of murder, terror and rape is carried out be the so-called elite forces led by Maher Al-Assad, the president’s brother, which is made up mainly of recruits from the Alawite and other non-Sunni minorities.
Soldiers refusing or showing the slightest reluctance to shoot to kill are themselves summarily executed by the Shabbiha thugs, or murderous death squads. Hundreds of such soldiers have been murdered and the killing blamed mendaciously on “infiltrators, fifth-columnists, and Jihadi fundamentalists.”
One human rights activist in the occupied Palestinian territories intimated to this writer that in 44 years of ruthless Israeli military occupation he never witnessed even a semblance of the barbarianism and sadism displayed by the Syrian regime against its own people.
“But Israel is our enemy and whatever war crimes or crimes against humanity the Israeli occupation army perpetrates against us happens in the context of this enduring enmity between the occupied and the occupier. The Syrian regime, however, is slaughtering its own people, including children, in order to keep a small junta of Alawite officers at the helm of power in Damascus.”
The Syrian regime seems to have exhausted its inventory of shameless disinformation about the popular revolution engulfing the country, but no one is quite sure. It blamed every conceivable and presumed foe, from Wahabbis to Mossad, for fomenting trouble against the regime.However, more and more ordinary Syrians, many of whom previously gave the regime the benefit of the doubt, have now discovered the bitter truth; namely that the regime is lying and killing the people.
There is no doubt that the sectarian regime in Syria is the main enemy of the Syrian people. This Syrian people is as entitled to liberty and freedom from tyranny and the police state apparatus as any other people under the sun, including Egyptians, Tunisians, Libyans and Yemenis.So why is the Arab League silent?