‘Kill them all’: Sectarian violence turns Syrian city into a slaughterhouse

Sweida, Syria – The last thing that Hatem Radhwan heard of warriors said, “Kill all of them. We don’t want them to define us.”

At that time, the five armed man, who was covered with desert camouflage uniforms and claimed to be with the Syrian Ministry of Defense, bowed their AK-47 rifles, “You pigs!” He shouted. And he sprayed with bullets in the room.

Radhwan, a 70-year-old blacksmith, grazed a bullet or a piece of debris-could not say-he grazed the lip. The gunmen fell to the ground as they continued to shoot.

Rashad Abu Saadeh, a neighbor hiding in his apartment opposite the street, heard the gunshots. “They continued to shoot for more than half a minute,” he said. “It sounded like a long time.”

The murders in the Radhwan family hall were part of a sectarian violence that swallowed the city of Sweida last week. Tank and mortar bombardment, summary executions and Israeli air strikes, the fight, about 1,380 dead, changed more than 120,000 people, and once a well -laid city translated, largely made the destruction of Syria’s 14 -year civil war.

Randa Mihrez, one of the coronars at the Sweida National Hospital, said, “There is no single house in the whole state that does not mourn someone.”

A ceasefire stopped the clashes between the Bedouin Clans and the Drze this month, but the losses continue to die.

Mihrez’s colleague Akram Naim passed the images of 509 bodies brought to the courtyard of the hospital during the fight. Days after the summer heat, it was transferred to a mass grave on Wednesday.

“The youngest victim was 3 months old, he was killed by shrapnel hit his stomach,” he said.

He clicked another photo – a young girl turned to the side with a harder expression on her head. A red line ran across his throat.

“This was 14 years old. He was massacred, Na Naim said.

“These are only people we know and who we can reach us, M Mihrez said, many victims were buried in temporary tombs near human homes, because the hospital was besieged during most of the wars.

“The last installment will be much worse,” he said.

In Radhwan’s house, the blacksmith finally dare to open his eyes five minutes after the armed leaving, to find out that he had filed around 17 family members. Thirteen were clearly killed; Four people survived, but in critical state, the fifth relative later died. Radhwan was often the only person who had not been damaged.

“They were screaming and I tried to move them to help them somehow. But I continued to slide on the blood, Rad Radhwan said, after the brown red stain filtered from the couch to the floor of the hall.

“A relative was bleeding and barely in life. He was begging, ‘He shot me’. But I had no weapons.

The crisis in Sweida, which came to the heels of the sectarian blood loss against minorities by groups that complied with the state, emphasized the difficulties faced by the provisional president Ahmad Al-Sharaa, who seized power in December after led the coalition of rebellious groups to overthrow the dictator Bashar Assad for a long time.

Although he received support from President Trump, who quickly followed the abolition of sanctions, he reopened his embassy in Damascus and sent an ambassador in Damascus and sent an ambassador defending the new government-Al-Sharaa, could not convince the rival groups to centralized under the jurisdiction of the rival groups, and the government forces actually made themselves compatible with the Bedouin.

Instead, the euphoria on Assad’s practice, many Syrians who did not trust Al-Sharaa’s Islamist past, received a sense of foreword, especially among minorities. Hard members of the fraction, Once upon a time, al -Qaeda Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, Drze’yi as a perverted to be killed.

On Thursday, one of the wounded from the city of Sweida, who was treated in a national hospital after the battles between Bedouin and Draze fractions in Sweida, Syria.

(For Hasan Belala/The Times)

This applies to the Drze, especially the supporters of a syncretic sect, a branch of Shiite Islam, which constitutes 3% of the Syrian population. There is an estimated 1 million droutes worldwide, half of them are in Syria and the rest of Lebanon, Israel and elsewhere. Many Syrian Draze proudly talk about the role of sects in the construction of the country’s nationalist consciousness, and often speak, families are married to Sultan Al-Atrash, a revolutionary who added an uprising against the French administration in Syria in the 1920s. Sweida, both the city and the state called the name, is the only region of the country with the majority of Draze.

During the civil war, Sweida took a careful distance from both Assad and the opposition, and the government allowed it to exist some autonomy. Since the release of Assad, the leading figures in the Draze community have tried to establish a good relationship with Damascus, but the militias rejected the integration under Al-Sharaa’s armed services, which consisted of rebellious groups that were not under the control of the temporary leader.

When the tastes and robberies between Bedouins and Draze became open war this month, the government mobilized its forces to restore the order. However, the inhabitants of Draze accused them of participating in a sectarian killing attack and fought.

Israel, which has been invading the large areas of the border areas of the northern neighbor since the release of Assad and demanded that Southern Syria to be a demilitarized region, responded to the demands of protecting Corelijists from its Draze and launched air strikes aimed at the Damascus center of the Syrian army and the Presidency. He also hit the forces in Sweida and forced them to retreat.

After these strikes, al-Sharaa accused Israel of intervening in Syria and trying to keep the country weak. However, on Thursday, the US’s special ambassador Tom Barrack, Syrian and Israeli officials in Paris, said that he had come together for “dialogue and climbing için for the first high -level talks between the two countries since 2000.

“And we succeeded in this on Thursday, Barrack on Thursday.

Approximately 1,500 people from the Bedouin tribal families held in Sweida Governorship were evacuated within the scope of the ceasefire agreement at the beginning of this week after violent clashes between tribal forces and religious leader Hikmat al-Hijri. The clashes in Sweida resulted in dozens of deaths.

(Through Rami Alsayed / Nurphoto Getty Images)

By the way, the mood in Sweida is nervous. A Drze Hizip Commander Yamen Zughayer, a Drze Hizip Commander standing near the Blacked shell of a tank of Israel Hit, looked at a path from Sweida.

“Our people still have bodies that we will still cannot return. A sniper is waiting for us there,” he said. He marched on a side street, pointing to the remains of the houses he said that he had been burned by Bedouins and state -linked fighters.

“Nothing happened to Sweida for 14 years of war. [For] The government has arrived for three hours and see what happened. ”

35-year-old Zughayer, who usually works as an automobile vendor, said that the tragedies given to Sweida prove that Duze, who suspects Al-Sharaa, is right.

Ne What would happen if we didn’t have weapons? We’re sitting here, we talk to you because of them, Z Zughayer said, he added that he wouldn’t accept any solution that doesn’t involve the grabbing arms of the militia.

Hashem Thababet, another warrior standing nearby, said that the Syrian government’s actions continued Drze like him, although Israel did not want to control the region.

“I don’t care who came to protect me as long as they do me. Israel said, then welcome to Israel,” he said. The government, “pushing us into his arms,” he added.

On Thursday, a strong explosion of an explosion in the town of Maarat Misrin, north of Idlib, Syria, hit a warehouse. The explosion caused at least 10 deaths and wounded more than 100 people. Civil defense teams, known as white helmets, continue to rescue operations in the middle of widespread destruction.

(Omar Albaw / Middle East Images / AFP Getty Images)

A few miles away from Vigil, Basel Abu Saab, on a naked mountain outside the skirts of Sweida, looked with brutal pleasure in the ditch he dug with his bulldozer – mass graves or families could not bury them for 149 people from the hospital.

Abu Saab said, ık Initially, we wanted to bury them in the backyard of the hospital, but the managers are worried that we would pollute the water reservoir, ”he said.

“The bodies were decomposing too much in the sun, they became unrecognizable. We could not wait anymore.”

Yes, the location for the mass grave was far from the city, but it was also far from fighting.

Abu Saab returned to the nearby road, walked around a pit where the blood buried his soaked body bags, his nose crushed into the smell. From the edge of the pit, he looked at the edge of a hospital garment, fluttering irregularly during the twilight breeze.