Joining The Revolution

"I was hiding in the orange trees but there were soldiers and shabiha (pro-regime militiamen) everywhere chasing people. It was horrible. They were running after people and the moment they caught one, they would cut his throat immediately and leave the body on the ground."

"The security forces stormed my neighbour's home and raped the four girls and then killed them along with their parents. I knew them very well. They used a knife to carve into the stomachs of the girls."

Refugees from Syria are streaming into Lebanon. Horror stories of abhorrent atrocities inflicted on the people of Homs by the military responding to orders from President Bashar al-Assad continue to shock. Lebanon's Hezbollah, of course, is in Syria, assisting the regime.

"People are thinking, 'If I stay in al-Qusayr I'm going to die so I have nothing to lose by trying to reach the Lebanese border. We couldn't live there any longer. The shelling was non-stop. they were using everything against us - rockets, mortars, machine guns."

Refugees from Baba Amro have flooded the border towns in Lebanon. Many have friends and family in those Sunni border villages. In Jdeideh, there is a mixed Christian and Sunni population. Refugees crowd into tiny houses; it is refuge from the horrors they have left behind.

One tells of a local imam arrested for reciting prayers over a mosque loudspeaker. He was tied to a truck and dragged out of Baba Amro. And then returned to his family four days later, for burial.

These are stories of what is occurring under the relentless onslaught of the Syrian army, the battalion led by Bashar's al-Assad's brother, Maher, hated and feared like his brother. These are stories fearfully told. Unverifiable, unfortunately, and as such, just stories. Stories told by haunted eyes who will never forget.

Another story is the defection of a minor Syrian ministry official who had been educated in Homs, so presumably he is Sunni, appalled enough finally by the atrocities being visited on his home and his co-sectarian Sunnis, to risk the backlash. "I know that they will burn my house, persecute my family, and fabricate lies against me."

Small price to pay? But he is, after all, a minor figure, not among the Alawites appointed to elite positions by President al-Assad. Although the Syrian Free Army do boast that no fewer than seven Syrian Army brigadier-generals have defected and joined them across the border where they have found shelter, in Turkey.

Good news: 35 countries voted at UNESCO to condemn Damascus for "the continued widespread and systematic violation of human rights and fundamental freedoms by the Syrian authorities". Not-so-good news: the 58-member UNESCO executive board declined to remove Syria as a member of its offshoot, the Committee on Conventions and Recommendations.