Syria dispatch: fear and hate in the killing zone of Houla
The eight vehicle convoy of UN land cruisers and Red Crescent ambulances headed down the one mile straight road towards Houla past ruined buildings towards the dead horse that lies rotting at a roundabout.
Syrian refugees take part in a demonstration against Syria's President Bashar al-Assad outside Syrian embassy in Amman Photo: Reuters
This macabre sight, along with an abandoned Syrian tank marked the beginning of rebel-held Houla. For a few hundred feet there was no sign of life and then quite suddenly the convoy was stopped in its tracks by a crowd that appeared from nowhere.
Women and girls joined in with the men chanting “Allahu Akbar” and “Assad, we
will cut your throat” with the appropriate gesture of the finger across the
throat.
I have scarcely witnessed such extraordinary scenes of people desperate to
tell the world what they have been through. We were passed from family to
family, house to house, by people, sometimes literally fighting to get their
story to the wider world.
All norms of Muslim culture seemed forgotten as we were shown to Riya’s bed. A
hauntingly beautiful 15-year-old girl was suddenly, gently rolled on to her
side to expose a large dressing where a bullet had exited her abdomen. There
are countless such stories. Everybody points to a group of Shia and Alawite
villages to the west and east of town. Places like Kabu and Fullah which you
can see clearly from the town centre. Everyone you meet says the killers
came from these villages to attack the Sunni people of Houla.
They all say that the killers had written a local Shia slogan on their
foreheads as they went about their business, shooting and hacking the
families of Houla to death. One man spoke for many when he said: “When this
is over and this is settled and we are victorious, we will kill them. We
will slaughter them and we will slaughter their children. We hate them.”
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