Eyewitness: ‘They seek to wear us down so we can no longer fight’

KHALED Saadi and his family were asleep in their apartment when the Syrian army unleashed its relentless bombardment on the city of Homs last week.

“It was one in the morning when we heard two terrifying, deafening explosions. I have never heard anything like it before,” said Saadi, an accountant and activist.

Moments later the electricity cut out and the neighbourhood was plunged into darkness. Stumbling out of his home Saadi saw the debris of two collapsing four-storey buildings on his street that had been hit by rockets. Smoke billowed into the sky, and the glow from flames lit up screaming victims.

“I started to help to dig bodies from the rubble. I didn’t know if they were dead or alive. There was no light so we used the glow of our mobile phones to search through the debris,” he said.

“I found a head and chest covered by a big stone. I thought I could save him. I grabbed him by the arms to take him from under the stone, but found only half a person. Body parts were everywhere, it was too awful to describe.”

Saadi, who claims to have informants inside the Syrian regime, has told Scotland on Sunday last week’s renewed crackdown on the rebellious neighbourhood of Khaldiyeh is part of a premeditated “experiment” planned by a furious dictator determined to crush his opponents, regardless of the cost to civilians.

The next phase is to impose a vice-like siege on the district intended to starve civilians and opposition fighters into submission, Saadi was told.

“There is no bread, no food, no water, nothing. There is no electricity, no communication. They have blocked off the exits, even families cannot escape,” he said. “The army is trying to wear people down so that everyone is too exhausted to fight.”

Before the revolution, Saadi worked as an accountant, living peacefully in his family home in Homs. After last week’s bombardment he was one of the few who managed to flee the neighbourhood, with his family. He spoke to Scotland on Sunday on condition his real name was changed to protect his identity. He said the overnight attack on Khaldiyeh lasted five hours, with residents scrambling to help the wounded as shells continued to pound the neighbourhood. Faced with Kalashnikov fire and rocket-propelled grenades, the revolutionary forces were rendered useless. “All they could do was try to survive,” said Saadi.

One of the fears facing the beleaguered residents was where to take the dying and the injured. Reports that protesters had been killed by security forces inside government hospitals made the main city medical centre too risky.

“We had to make split second decisions; if the victim looked like he could survive we took him to the nearby mosque for treatment or to our underground clinic. Those that had little chance of living we took to the main hospital. I loaded 30 near lifeless bodies on a truck and took them, but we knew that nobody would help them,” said Saadi.

Inside the mosque, locals attempted to treat the injured as best they could. “There was no one to give proper care, no Red Crescent or other expert medical teams, just amateur first aiders, people who maybe in past months had learnt from internet tutorials,” he said.

As the shells rained down, men used the speakers in the mosques to call for families living on upper floors of buildings to seek shelter in basements or on the ground. They made pleas for blood donations. Prayers of “God is great” washed across the district, an attempt to bolster morale among a helpless population.

“From two in the morning until the early hours everyone was out on the street. Some tried to salvage bodies from hit buildings, others gave blood and others prepared the shrouds in which to wrap the dead. If a person had less than ten per cent chance of survival we prepared a shroud coffin for him because in the conditions we knew that he would not survive,” said Saadi.

The catalyst for last week’s onslaught may have been an attack by militia men, of the Free Syrian Army, on a “trigger-happy” military checkpoint in the city, said Saadi.

The militia used gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades to kill ten guards. A further 19 who surrendered their weapons and begged for their lives, were taken captive.

Six hours later, after the United Nations’ resolution calling on president Assad to stand down was vetoed by Russia and China, the sustained rocket attack on Homs began. “They know they will not end the revolution by hitting these buildings. But it has become part of the policy to beat them into submission; attack the civilians until the Free Syrian Army living among them surrenders,” said Saadi.

The attacks were launched from a citadel in the centre of Homs, giving a view across the whole city, with sniper positions and mortar attacks set up at strategic points.

“They made the conscious decision to indiscriminately shell civilian areas,” said Saadi. The Syrian army were under instructions to crush the opposition inside Homs and place the city under seige, was told by officers.

“We have a lot of military officers who want to defect, but are staying in their positions to act as our eyes and ears on the regime,” he said.

“Many of our men in the Free Syrian Army only recently left the army of Bashar al-Assad and still have close connections with men inside”.

For months these contacts have worked against Assad, said Saadi, first by leaking the names of activists wanted by the regime and through tip-offs of house raids, or the location of planned checkpoints.

As troops and tanks mass around the areas that have been “softened up”, residents now fear a full-scale ground intervention any day now.