'They are pushing Syria into a religious war that they will certainly get'
Life and death in a terrified town near Homs preparing for a bloody onslaught by the Syrian army
Civilians flee after tanks enter the northwestern city of Idlib. Photograph: Xinhua/Xinhua/Photoshot
Martin Chulov near Homs
guardian.co.uk
Thursday 16 February 2012 12.32 EST
Late afternoon in southern Syria and a night sky is fast descending on a dark and terrified town, down the valley from Homs. An iron door creaks open and a young trader, Mahmoud, bounds up the stairwell of his home carrying a video camera, which he has just used to film himself digging his own grave. The cemetery is just over the road, behind a shuttered row of shops that adjoin a sniper ally. Behind it, no more than 500 metres away, is the Syrian army.
"This gives me dignity," said Mahmoud beaming proudly as he showed the footage of a shovel thudding time and again among white tomb stones into the hard red dirt of the graveyard. "That's all I want from this life from now on," he said. "Getting rich, or getting married doesn't matter."
He fumbled in the dark for a withered mandarin orange to offer as hospitality, then continued: "If I die as a martyr at least I will be dignified. Living like this I am not."
All around this town, which the Guardian is not naming at the request of locals, there is a sense of the inevitable. People are preparing for an onslaught that they fear will soon pitch them against the large and vengeful military hidden on the outskirts. Each day and night, the regime's snipers, perched in low set government buildings, remind residents that the might of the Syrian army is out there – and preparing to come after them.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/16/syria-revolution-religious-war?newsfeed=true
Horrible.
= new reply since forum marked as read
