Set up to be shot by Syrian Rebels? We are led another route. Led in fact, straight into a free-fire zone. Told by the Free Syrian Army to follow a road that was blocked off in the middle of no-man’s-land.

British Channel 4 journalist Alex Thomson: The Syrian ‘rebels’ set me up to be shot at by Syrian military

Alex Thomson
Channel 4

Alex Thomson in Syria. If only the few half-decent journalists in the MSM would bother to read Sott.net and other alt.news websites, they might learn a thing or two about who they’re dealing with before walking into such traps.

Standing outside the Safir Hotel in Homs as the white UN Nissan landcruisers stood waiting, the Irish officer in charge, Mark Reynolds, came over: “Usual rules Alex OK? We’re not responsible for you guys. If you get into trouble we’ll leave you, yes? You’re on your own.”

“Yup – no problem Mark. Understood.”

I always say that, sort of assuming it will never come to that in any case.

Just two UN plus the local police white patrol car marked “Protocol” as escort, moving south through the peaceful areas of Homs, unmarked by war.

Barely ten minutes south from the city and it’s goodbye protocol. The last Syrian Army checkpoint is right on the main highway south to Damascus.

We’re headed west – just follow the direction the tank barrel is pointing next to the parked protocol car and you get the idea.

There’s always that slight tightening of the stomach across deserted no-mans-land, but this is open country, no sign of fighting.

Presently, the first motorbike picks us up and we are across and into the first Free Syrian Army checkpoint.

After a long and dusty half-hour of tracks across olive groves, we arrive at al Qusayr, to the predictable crowd scene.

The UN settles down for a long meeting with the civilian and military leaders here. It looks much like an Afghan “shura” to me. Everyone is cross legged on the cushions around the room, except it is Turkish coffee passed round rather than chai.

We settle down to filming outside. The women and boys bring us oranges and chairs in the heat. Shell fragments are produced to be filmed. They explain how the shelling will begin again as soon as we leave – a claim which, by its nature, must remain untested, though there is certainly extensive shell damage in some parts of town here.

So we while away the time, waiting for the UN to move – they’re the only way across the lines with any degree of safety of course.

But time drags. Our deadline begins to loom. And there’s this really irritating guy who claims to be from “rebel intelligence” and won’t quite accept that we have a visa from the government.

In his book foreign journos are people smuggled in from Lebanon illegally and that’s that. We don’t fit his profile.

He and his mates are making things difficult for our driver and translator too – their Damascus IDs and our Damascus van reg are not helping.

This is new. Different. Hostile. This is not like Homs or Houla and still the UN meeting drags on in the hot afternoon…

We decide to ask for an escort out the safe way we came in. Both sides, both checkpoints will remember our vehicle.

Set up to be shot?

Suddenly four men in a black car beckon us to follow. We move out behind.

We are led another route. Led in fact, straight into a free-fire zone. Told by the Free Syrian Army to follow a road that was blocked off in the middle of no-man’s-land.

At that point there was the crack of a bullet and one of the slower three-point turns I’ve experienced. We screamed off into the nearest side-street for cover.

Another dead-end.

There was no option but to drive back out onto the sniping ground and floor it back to the road we’d been led in on.

Predictably the black car was there which had led us to the trap. They roared off as soon as we re-appeared.

I’m quite clear the rebels deliberately set us up to be shot by the Syrian Army. Dead journos are bad for Damascus.

That conviction only strengthened half an hour later when our four friends in the same beaten-up black car suddenly pulled out of a side-street, blocking us from the UN vehicles ahead.

The UN duly drove back past us, witnessed us surrounded by shouting militia, and left town.

Eventually we got out too and on the right route, back to Damascus.

Please, do not for one moment believe that my experience with the rebels in al Qusair was a one-off.

This morning I received the following tweet:

“@alextomo I read your piece “set up to be shot in no mans land”, I can relate as I had that same experience in Al Zabadani during our tour.”

That was from Nawaf al Thani, who is a human rights lawyer and a member of the Arab League Observer mission to Syria earlier this year.

It has to make you wonder who else has had this experience when attempting to find out what is going on in rebel-held Syria.

In a war where they slit the throats of toddlers back to the spine, what’s the big deal in sending a van full of journalists into the killing zone?

It was nothing personal.

Related articles

• Set up to be shot in Syria’s no man’s land? (blogs.channel4.com)
• Syria: Journalists set up to be Shot by the Rebels (salem-news.com)
• Alex Thomson Says ‘Syria Rebels Led Me Into Death Trap’ (antioligarch.wordpress.com)
• Syrian Rebels Set Trap for British Journalists (theaveragejoenewsblogg.com)
• Syrian rebels tried to get reporter killed in anti-Assad propaganda bid – report (rt.com)
• More Western Journalists Blame Rebels for Syria Violence (aangirfan.blogspot.com)
• Syrian Rebels Set Trap for British Journalists (EndtheLie.com)
• Reporter Accuses Syrian Rebels of Luring Him Into Death Trap (thelede.blogs.nytimes.com)

Disgusting: it turns out that these children were executed from point-blank range and cut up with machetes by the Syrian ‘rebels’ directed by Washington, DC.

Houla massacre carried out by Houla massacre, says Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Chris Marsden
World Socialist Website

Disgusting: it turns out that these children were executed from point-blank range and cut up with machetes by the Syrian ‘rebels’ directed by Washington, DC.

The May 25 Houla massacre was perpetrated by opposition forces aligned with the Free Syrian Army (FSA), according to Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

The report refutes the official account by the United States and other major powers and presented uncritically by the media. The massacre was attributed to pro-government forces and used to step up the propaganda offensive for military intervention against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Without providing any serious evidence, the US and its allies claimed that either the Syrian Army or pro-government Shabiha militas carried out the mass killing of over 100 people.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on June 7 published a report from Damascus by Rainer Hermann, who based his article on investigations by oppositionists who visited the area and took eye-witness testimony. They largely confirm the account of the events in Houla given by the Assad government.

“Their findings contradict allegations of the rebels, who had blamed the Shabiha militias which are close to the regime”, Hermann wrote, adding, “As oppositionists rejecting the use of force have been killed or at least threatened lately, the oppositionists did not want to see their names mentioned.”

The massacre took place after Friday prayers and began with an attack by Sunni “rebels” on three Syrian army checkpoints around Houla. “The checkpoints are designed to protect the Alawite villages around the mostly Sunni Houla”, the German daily reported.

Reinforcements were sent by the Syrian Army and fighting went on for 90 minutes, during which “dozens of soldiers and rebels were killed.”

It was during these exchanges that the three villages of Houla were blocked off from the outside world. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote: “According to eyewitnesses, the massacre took place during this time. Among the dead were almost exclusively families of the Alawite and Shia minorities of Houla, the population of which is made up of 90 percent Sunnis. Several dozen members of a family that had converted in recent years from the Sunni faith to Shia Islam were slaughtered. Also among the dead were members of the Alawite family Shomaliya and the family of a Sunni member of parliament who was regarded as a collaborator.”

The report continued: “Immediately after the massacre, the offenders are said to have filmed their victims, calling them Sunni victims, and distributed the videos via the Internet.”

This account is a devastating refutation of the propaganda campaign waged by Washington, London and Paris, with the aid of the Syrian National Council, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and a pliant Western media.

On the day of the attacks, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, without evidence, condemned the Syrian government‘s “unacceptable levels of violence and abuses”, including the use of heavy weapons on civilian populations.

The regime noted that the massacre was timed to coincide with the visit of UN envoy Kofi Annan to Damascus. It charged that the mass killings were carried out to undermine the ceasefire Annan had negotiated. Soon after, the FSA, which is now accused of carrying out the massacre, said it would no longer respect the Annan peace plan. New demands for military intervention came thick and fast.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung article is given additional weight by a report in Spiegel Online from March 29 pointing to the widespread practice of summary execution carried out by the FSA. Spiegel interviewed a member of an opposition “burial brigade” who had “executed four men by slitting their throats.”

His victims included a Shiite soldier in the Syrian army, who had “been beaten into a confession, or that he was terrified of death and had begun to stammer prayers.”

The burial brigade kill and “leave torture to others; that’s what the so-called interrogation brigade is for”, Speigel wrote.

That report noted that whereas an admitted 150 Syrian army prisoners have been executed, “the executioners of Homs have been busier with traitors within their own ranks.”

“If we catch a Sunni spying, or if a citizen betrays the revolution, we make it quick”, one oppositionist explained. “According to Abu Rami, Hussein’s burial brigade has put between 200 and 250 traitors to death since the beginning of the uprising.”

Also of immediate relevance are reports on the web site of the Monastery of St. James the Mutilated in Qara, Syria. On April 1, Mother Agnès-Mariam de la Croix wrote of an incident in the Khalidiya neighborhood in Homs in which the FSA gathered Christian and Alawite hostages in a building and blew it up. They then blamed the Syrian army.

“The Al Amoura family in Al Durdak village, in the Homs area, was exterminated by Wahhabi terrorists. Forty-one people from this family had their throats slit in one day“, she also reported.

Agnès-Mariam stated that of Homs’ one million inhabitants, two thirds of the population had fled, including over 90 percent of Christians, due to the activities of “snipers and acts of criminal aggression” against “the Alawite and Christian minorities, Shiites, and many ‘moderate’ Muslims who did not choose to participate in dissident activity.”

She wrote that in numerous sectarian attacks “… people were mutilated, their throats slit, disembowelled, cut up, thrown in street corners or trash cans. They did not stop at shooting children at point-blank range to create distress and despair, as was the case with the young Sari, the nephew of our stonecutter. Such horrific acts were then exploited in the media to put responsibility on government forces.”

Even without such corroborative accounts, the silence of the world’s media on the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung report is extraordinary. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung is a respected, indeed conservative, publication, with a circulation in the hundreds of thousands and a daily readership in 148 countries. Yet no major newspaper took up its report, because they are all complicit in the dissemination of naked propaganda. There is literally nothing in the reports of the mainstream Western media that can be taken as good coin.

The most important question posed by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung report, however, is what role was played in the massacre by the United States itself. Clearly, given its own extensive contacts with the Free Syrian Army, and the political, financial and military backing for the FSA by Washington’s regional allies – Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey – the Obama administration will have been well aware that the massacre was the work of anti-regime insurgents and not the Syrian army, even as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others called for additional action to be taken to depose Assad.

It is entirely possible that Houla was a massacre made in the USA.

US policy in Syria has from the start been based on the whipping up of a Sunni-based sectarian insurgency, with the aim of destabilising and deposing Assad’s Alawite regime. This, in turn, is linked to US preparations for a military attack on Iran, which would be further isolated in the Middle East with the demise of Assad, its major ally in the region.

With the experience of Bosnia and Kosovo to draw upon, this was done not merely in the certain knowledge that bloody internecine fighting would result, but with the intention of provoking civil conflict in order to provide a pretext for military intervention in humanitarian guise.

On Monday, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland expressed her “concern” about reports that the regime “may be organising another massacre” in Latakia province. “People will be held accountable”, she warned.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton escalated the crisis Tuesday, accusing Russia of sending attack helicopters to the Assad regime and charging Moscow with lying about its arms shipments.

The head of UN peace keeping operations, meanwhile, became the first United Nations official to describe the Syrian conflict as a civil war, and British Foreign Secretary William Hague, referring to the massacres at Houla and al-Qubair, denounced the Syrian government for committing “grotesque crimes.”

Related articles

• Report: Syrian Rebels Responsible for Houla Massacre (news.antiwar.com)
• Houla massacre carried out by Syrian ‘rebels’, says Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (ww.sott.net)
• Syria – There Are No Good Guys (themoderatevoice.com)
• The truth about the Syrian massacres (tgrule.com)
• Implosion of The Houla Massacre Story – Is Anyone Paying Attention? (blacklistednews.com)
• Massacres in Syria (aangirfan.blogspot.com)
• Avaaz’s war on Syria: Soros sponsored sorrow pleads for foreign intervention (worldmathaba.net)
• Dissent Within Syrian Opposition: Houla Massacre Was Committed By Rebels/Terrorists Say Opposition Members (disquietreservations.blogspot.com)