Eyewitnesses recount massacre of Western supported “Activists” in Adra, Syria. Maybe the offensive was supported by US weaponry of the US warehouse wich was taken over by the activists.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbEqLpvuGHU
A woman, hiding her face from the camera, told RT of the beheadings she had seen.
“There was slaughter everywhere,” she said. “The eldest was only 20 years old; he was slaughtered. They were all children. I saw them with my own eyes. They killed fourteen people with a machete. I don’t know if these people were Alawites. I don’t know why they were slaughtered. They grabbed them by their heads and slaughtered them like sheep.”
Abductions, torture, killing, sharia courts, secret prisons with “inhuman” conditions – that’s what an Al-Qaeda-linked jihadist group in Syria is accused of in the latest report by Amnesty International. Victims included children as young as eight.
According to the Amnesty report, people were seized by masked men, held for weeks on end in solitary confinement at unknown locations and tried by self-styled Islamic sharia courts, which frequently pass death sentences or impose harsh corporal punishment.
Former detainees described being beaten with rubber generator belts or cables, tortured with electric shocks and being forced into a painful stress position known as the “scorpion” in which the detainee’s wrists are bound over one shoulder.
All the prisoners detained by the group ISIS (the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham) were held in “cruel and inhuman conditions.”
What evidence is there that the massacre in Adra took place?
The Town
Wikipedia: Adra, Syria
What happened
Islamic Front entered the town of Adra on December 11th (presumably as part of Phase II of the East Ghouta offensive [that’s a guess]). On December 13th the government counter-attacked. As it stands, the rebels have held out surprisingly well against government counter-attacks.
Wikipedia lists the confirmed death toll at 36, but that links to a link about the government bombing raids on Aleppo with no mention of Adra. Wikipedia goes on to state: “Syrian military claimed more than 80 people were killed by Islamic rebels,[9] while the Syrian Foreign Ministry put out a figure of more than 100 dead.[10]”
Official Statements
SOHR: “Reef Dimashq: 32 civilians have been documented as killed after Jabhat al-Nusra and several other Islamist factions attacked the city of Adra al-Ummaliya on wednesday morning, most of the victims were Alawites, the casualties also include people from other minorities such as Shi’a and Druze,. the dead include no less than 2 children and 4 women. There are reports of dozens of disappeared persons in the city. 1 fighter from al-Nusra was killed by clashes in Adra.”
- This official statement does not state how these civilians were killed. But there does seem to be an insinuated causality between the JaN entering the city and the civilians being killed. Also needs to be some clarification on the ‘disappeared persons.’
HRW: ““I am afraid we cannot comment at this stage, as our research is still ongoing and it has been very difficult to get accurate information about what is happening in Adra and who is responsible for the abuses,” Lama Fakih, the watchdog’s Syria and Lebanon Researcher told RT in an e-mail.”
- Nothing to work off of there.
IRC: “”We don’t have access to this area and can neither confirm nor deny any information circulating,” the ICRC said in a reply to RT’s request for comment.”
- Or there.
News Articles
RT: Russia condemns Adra massacre, calls on world community to react
- “While the Syrian army continues its broad push to get the insurgents out of Adra, RT Arabic has gathered eyewitness accounts of what happened in the town last week, when it was captured by Islamist rebels of the Al-Nusra front and the Army of Islam. Those who managed to flee the violence in Adra and reach Damascus say they saw the militants slaughtering Alawites, Druze, Christians and Shiites indiscriminately. Fearing their interviews might do harm to their relatives still in the occupied town, the fugitive survivors asked not to reveal their identities.One of them told RT that all of the officials in the town were killed “no matter what religious groups they belonged to.” “Among them were people who did not support any of the warring parties – neither the opposition nor the government. Nevertheless, they have been abused – they were terrorized and used as human shields,” the witness said. There’s no reliable way at the moment to communicate with the people trapped inside Adra, but RT Arabic’s Abutaleb Albohaya, reporting from Damascus, cites the country’s officials as saying that “the atrocities against the civilian population are continuing.” “What is happening in Adra is unthinkable,” one of the Adra escapees told RT. “Children are being slaughtered and thrown out of the windows. But no one is doing anything. The crisis in Syria continues in an environment where there is no international law, including those relating to the paramilitary operations.”
So RT’s evidence comes from escapees fleeing Adra who have reported this to foreign news agencies. These escapees have remained anonymous. The use of the term ‘witness’ suggests that these individuals were present to witness these attacks.
BBC: Syria conflict: ‘Islamist rebels’ kill Adra civilians
“An attack by Islamist rebels has left at least 10 people dead over the past two days in the Syrian town of Adra, activists and eyewitnesses say. Most of the victims were from minority sects, reports said. State media said on Friday that the army had launched a “broad offensive” in the direction of Adra”
So according to the BBC they’re working off of activist (unidentified) and eyewitnesses (plural) accounts. Why are the main stream media so goddamn annoying in linking to the reports their sourcing? Not much I can do with that
Tehran Times: New facts emerge about massacre in Adra, Syria
“People toasted in ovens: What the extremist militants did when they entered Adra on Wednesday morning was a “massacre,” a local resident told RT. “The situation was terrible – with killing, atrocities, and fear as the background. Unidentified armed men came into town, but it was obvious that they were Jabhat al-Nusra militants,” Muhammad Al-Said said. “The worst crime they committed was that they toasted people in ovens used to bake bread when those people came to buy it. They kidnapped and beat up many,” he added. According to Al-Said, the rebels committed the atrocities so they could place blame on government forces. But the resident said that Adra citizens are “waiting for Syrian troops to save us from the terrorists, who came from other countries.” “Those, who could, fled to Damascus. Some hid in the basement, with infants, the elderly, women, and sick people among them. The situation was really terrible,” Al-Said said.”
So here we have an local resident (unclear if he’s an eye witness), Muhammad Al-Said, reporting these allegations. What can be made of it?
The Primary Evidence That’s Been Reported
Yesterday Felim McMahon asked this question in Open Newsroom: RT report on alleged mass atrocities in Adra, Damascus. What do we know about this? Searching for related content for +Storyful and will post here too.
He found that this pro-government Facebook page reported: Offers a broad progress Syrian Arab Army forces and national defense during the last few hours in the city (Basil Assad) unions in Adra, where it was re-control (9 Jazeera and Al-Jazeera and Al-Jazeera 7 8 down to the bakery and automated station) … The terrorists killed dozens … pray for our military forces and national defense in the fight against terrorism, and more kinds of brutal ..
Only thing worthy of note there is that the page was only set up on December 12th.
This is another key source of these claims from a ‘anonymous government official’:
What is an “official source”? RT told us that their source was an escapee, does this official refer to the same thing or is there a different source? The source appears to report that 200 people were killed according to their ‘sectarian affiliations’ but how can that source estimate this number? Also the source then appears to have stuck around til the evening to watch the government ‘burned the homes of some government officials’? Would this source have done that after watching 200 people be executed?
SummarySo far the articles on this alleged massacre appear to be based off of escapee accounts, possible eye witnesses (anonymous), the SOHR report of deaths (but not causality) and Mohammad Al-Said (a local resident unclear if he’s a witness).
As Western media continue to relentlessly portray the Syrian regime as illegitimate and not of the people, hoping to drum up international and regional support while Takfiri militias massacre their way through local civilian populations, spinning lies after lies to shield the public from the bitter truth, too often have the people fallen into the pit of misinformation and propaganda.
In a world such as ours, where realities have been altered to fit the world’s agendas, and evil has been disguised as truth, one needs to keep one’s feet firmly on the ground and remember that whenever Western powers speak of truth, more often than not, they are indeed professing deceit and spreading preposterous lies.
For one, Syria’ so-called 2011 revolution never actually was. While some Syrian might have at first expressed some desires to see implemented reforms in Syria, motivated by a need to see things evolve, it was foreign powers that sought to use the Islamic Awakening to covertly design Syria’s invasion. From the outset, the West and its regional allies, namely Qatar and Saudi Arabia, have worked together to destabilize Syria as a nation state, toward two goals: destroying the regional power.
Western nations’ weapon of choice – Al-Qaeda
As per written by Professor Michel Chossudovsky, the founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal and the editor of the globalresearch.ca website, in his latest analysis, “The US, NATO, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have channeled most of their support to the al-Qaeda brigades, which are also integrated by Western Special Forces. British and French Special Forces have been actively training opposition rebels from a base in Turkey. Today, history repeats itself. NATO and the [P]GCC have been involved in recruiting, training and arming Jihadists; i.e. Salafi militants, whose religious compass has been twisted so far beyond recognition that it has become difficult to label them as Muslims. It is such militias that have rained down terror on Syria; it is those Barbarians that the Syrian Armed Forces have had to oppose day in and day out for the past two years; and yet it is those who have opposed evil who have been called monsters.
Professor Chossudovsky wrote, “The al-Qaeda fighters integrated by mercenaries, trained in Saudi Arabia and Qatar constitute the mainstay of so-called opposition forces, which have been involved in countless atrocities and terrorist acts directed against the civilian population from the outset in March 2011.”
The plot runs deeper
This is the lie those New World Order fanatics would have you believe. Moreover, this fantasy Western powers have been keen to entertain the lies they have worked so hard to sell you; that their support only goes to those moderate elements within the opposition are again blatant falsities; fabrications aimed to reassure an already gullible public. There is no moderate opposition, only the Takfiris. And yes, the West has been directly channeling its aids to al-Qaeda leaders, the men they have allegedly been fighting across the Islamic World, the very men they have set out to pursue on the wake of 9/11.
As per claimed by Global Research Canada, “The FSA and its Supreme Military Command essentially serve as a front organization. The SMC under the helm of General Salim Idriss has largely been used to channel support to the terrorists. In recent developments, fighting has broken out between the al-Qaeda-affiliated rebels covertly supported by the West and the more moderate FSA brigades, officially supported by the West.”
Eager to distance itself from the recent bloodshed, Washington’s new tactic is to portray the new Islamic Front as a moderate faction it will be able to publicly support, while denying any links to Salafi hardliners, the deep-state of Islamic fanaticism.
“With the FSA Supreme Military Command in disarray, Washington’s objective is to provide a semblance of legitimacy to the insurrection largely integrated by the Western military alliance’s Al Qaeda foot soldiers,” wrote Chossudovsky.
But truth is undeniable, and history will remember.