Desecration of Humanity

"When I regained consciousness, I looked around, and I found my daughters dead.  One of them - her hand was cut off.  My cousin and her four sons were killed.  My sister and her six-week old daughter were killed.
"I want someone to save us.  Where can I go, where in the world is there anyone to protect us?  What is the guilt of a six-week-old child?" 

This, the plaintive cry of a mother of four daughters, herself initially shot through the hand, who fainted and when she was revived discovered there was no one left alive.  As dreadful as the murders were that took place in her home, the mind that conceived of allowing this woman to remain alive so she would relive the horror day in, day out, of the day her family was destroyed, reveals the depth of hatred involved.


This is a hatred so dense and intense, so deep and so affecting that it consumes both protagonists; which just happen to be tribal people who passionately worship the very same god, but the misfortune lies in the fact that they worship Islam from a different perspective; one Sunni, the other Shia, and its offshoots.  Fed from infancy from the deep dish of contempt and hatred for the other, they view each another as sub-human, as foetid, intolerable insults to Allah.


The woman who survived believes that the armed gangs who arrived in Houla from nearby villages after the withdrawal of Syrian regime troops were Alawites loyal to President Bashar al-Assad.  First the bombardment of tank and artillery fire, which killed only a handful of people.  And then the arrival of those dispatched to come in close and personal and complete the carnage by hand, with knives and with guns. 

She fled to the roof of her house to look out on the scene of chaos below. "I looked out from the rooftop, and I found them burning the houses around.  They killed the Othman family, who lived next door."  And even as rescuers came on the scene, they found paramilitaries running through the streets in numbers they were unable to confront.  They heard the screams of children calling for their mothers, and even then the shells were falling all about, smoke rising from bombed-out homes.


They hid, the would-be rescuers, witness, they claim, to what transpired further, for the action continued for hours upon weary hours.  "For hours I heard the screams of women and three times of children, and always gunshots.  Then the voices stopped.  The silence was the most terrible thing.  We moved into the first house.  There were bodies everywhere."


"I can never forget what I saw in Houla.  It keeps coming back to me, every horrible detail.  What happened is unimaginable.  It is not human."  But, in fact, it is very human.  We would prefer it not be, but the reality is that this is what humans do to one another.  Most humans are restrained by the civilizing effects of living in places of the world where such intolerable actions do not occur.  But this, of course, is a part of the world where they do occur.


The world at large now knows what Syria is capable of producing.  The shabiha militias that follow in the wake of the government forces act in concert to protect their minority interests in a country that is long accustomed to seeing the majority Sunni population in thrall to the minority Alawite leaders.  And this is a formula that is reflected in many other Middle East Muslim countries. 

And this is human nature, unchecked by civility and decency and compassion.


And, uncuriously enough, here is a statement from one man from Houla, speaking to Alex Thomson, chief correspondent of channel 4 News in Britain:  "When this is over and this is settled and we are victorious, we will kill them.  We will slaughter them and we will slaughter their children.  We hate them."