Syria 1st-Hand: Darayya After the Mass Killing --- "The Stink of Death" (Di Giovanni)
Sunday, September 9, 2012 at 10:06A funeral procession in Darayya in August, days before the deadly regime attacks
Janine di Giovanni of the Guardian reports from the Damascus suburb of Darayya, where regime attacks killed hundreds of people in late August:
The young mechanic had lost the sight in his right eye during the battle of Darayya. Still, he searched for his missing father for three days, combing destroyed buildings and piles of rubble. He finally found the old man dead on the outskirts of town, at a farm with three other bodies, boys aged 16-20. "Why kill an old man?" he asks.
He is not the only one to ask the question. An estimated 500 people were slaughtered in Darayya over two and a half days at the end of last month. Rebels and the government accuse each other. Left behind is a town destroyed beyond recognition.
According to Human Rights Watch, which has interviewed Darayya residents and analysed satellite images of the battle, evidence points towards government responsibility for the killings, although it is not clear whether uniformed men or the shabiha militia carried out the killings after the town was bombed by helicopters and shelled.
"What we don't know yet is who did the dirty work, the executions – whether it was men in uniform or shabiha," says HRW's Ole Solvang. "We're still investigating."
Witnesses speak of intense shelling from helicopters with mounted machine guns, mortars from a government military airport near the Mezzah neighbourhood, and snipers in buildings in the north of the city. They speak of bodies lying in the street, and groups of civilians hiding underground only to be found and summarily killed.
Shortly after the events, in an extraordinary act of indecency, the pro-regime television journalist Micheline Azar, entered the town to interview the dying, sticking her microphone in front of their bloody and wounded faces. She said the killings were "in the name of freedom". Not even children were spared her intrusions.
"It was horrific," says Reem, a Darayya resident. "She was a vulture. She went through the crowds talking to the wounded as though she was floating on water, as though there was not this scene of hell in front of her."
Two weeks on, Darayya still stinks of death. A poor Sunni suburb south of Damascus, it had been well known for furniture-making, and for its peaceful resistance before the conflict. Now it is a ghost town of shattered glass and broken graveyard walls, bombed vegetable shops and decapitated blocks of flats. Rank rubbish is piled on corners, uncollected. There is the unmistakable smell of rotting corpses that have not yet been removed from houses. A lone bicyclist makes his way awkwardly through the rubble and debris.
The town is still and lifeless. There is no way to confirm the death tally. It ranges from opposition reports of more than 1,000 to government figures of several hundred. The local gravedigger says he has already buried 1,000, and more bodies are found every day. The mounds of freshly dug, moist earth in the cemetery in the middle of town look like they harbour at least several hundred dead.
A woman who comes to the graveyard each day to check a list for news of her sons says: "We are still searching houses and abandoned ruins trying to find them." She says everyone waits for the hour when the gravedigger arrives and there are new bodies to identify.
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