The past few days marked 4 years since the horrific massacre in Banyas. At that time I shared every image that was released because I felt so guilty of being safe as my people faced the most gruesome and brutal of massacres. The images continue to haunt me.
Entire families were slaughtered using knives and hammers and rape was used as a weapon prior to the killing or after it. Bodies were everywhere. The children had all wet themselves..the images were horrific.
I mean everywhere. Some who survived walked through the streets filming the scene. Their breath so deep in the video because even if the knives never killed them, the shock would.
Babies and kids everywhere. Slaughtered. This was before ISIS came to existence. Yet no one recalls it..or cares. Human Rights Watch (report attached below) documented the several massacres that took place in the past free days in 2013 but Assad is still innocent….. also many assume today If it’s a knife it has to be ISIS it’s their thing radical Islam and slaughtering – The whole mess in Syria is because of ISIS …. even got told that at work that why are you saying Assad is bad it’s ISIS that did that to your family in 2012.
ISIS never existed till near end of 2013. Prior to that my family had already been slaughtered, missing, tortured or displaced. This area Banyas and others including Daraya where over 300 civilians were executed with knives and another area Karam Alzaytoon where dozens were slaughtered with knives and Hama suburbs were dozens were slaughtered with knives and baba Amr bombed to the ground etc etc and the list goes on … was committed by sectarian barbaric regime led militia groups because these areas were either not the sect the regime liked or they were opposition or they were in the way and needed removing so that the ethnic cleansing and demographical change, intended by Assad and his sectarian partners including Iran, could happen.
These families never got justice. Some family members were at school, work or university and came home to find their whole family gone. Some witnessed the massacre but faked dead and so were spared and have to live with those images/memories every day.
In Jobar,my village in another city, my dads sister-in-law had to fake dead and use blood from my dads cousin to not get killed as she witnessed the regime forces enter homes and shoot everyone.
Every day of the year has a terrible memory attached to it. And then the next year comes and a new horrible memory adds on because the Assad regime continues to destroy the lives of Syrians for the 6th year running.
Pray for Syria.
HRW report on these massacres
rosealhomsi 