World | Middle East Published: 14 July 2015, 06:42 GMT
’THEY CAME BEFORE DAWN’: THE KILLING OF SYRIA’S ALAWITES, AND THE ARMY THAT WATCHED
BEIRUT — Umm Kareem was asleep when they came to her village.
She does not know what time it was. She knows it was before the call to prayer, still dark, and that she woke to the sound of her neighbor’s house burning. By the time she reached the street her husband was already dead in the doorway. She took her two youngest children — the older ones she could not find in the dark — and ran toward the hills, toward the coast, toward the sea.
She walked for three days. She is forty-one years old and she looks twenty years older than that. She is sitting in a canvas-roofed enclosure outside the perimeter fence of the Soviet naval base at Tartus, Syria, where she has been living for five weeks, and she is telling me this in a flat, careful voice, the voice of someone who has told the story enough times that the telling no longer requires her full presence.
“My older children,” she says. “I don’t know.”
There are approximately 23,000 people living in enclosures like hers outside the Tartus base perimeter. Another estimated 31,000 at the Hmeimim air base perimeter near Latakia. Syrian Alawites, the minority sect from which Bashar al-Assad drew his political base and much of his military officer corps, fleeing a wave of killings that began in the villages of western Syria within days of Assad’s departure and has not stopped.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, in a report released last week, estimated that between 38,000 and 52,000 Alawite civilians have been killed since early June. The organization described the killings as “the most severe episode of sectarian mass violence in the Middle East since the 1982 Hama massacre” and called for immediate international intervention to protect remaining civilian populations.
No intervention has come.
NO BANNER, NO ORDER
What is happening in western Syria does not have a name or an organization. That is part of what makes it so difficult to stop, and so difficult to report.
This is not a campaign. There is no commander issuing orders for the killing of Alawites, no faction that has claimed responsibility, no ideology being formally articulated. What there is, across hundreds of villages in Latakia, Tartus, and Homs governorates, is four years of accumulated grievance — of families who lost sons to Assad’s security forces, of towns that were shelled, of prisoners who were tortured, of scores that were kept in silence because keeping score was the only safe option — detonating in the absence of any authority capable of preventing it.
The Islamist factions that have moved into Damascus and the major cities have issued statements condemning the killings. Several have been genuine. Several others have been issued by organizations whose own members have participated in the violence. The new transitional council, still forming, still negotiating its own internal composition, does not control the countryside. It may not control it for months.
In the meantime, the villages burn.
“Everyone knew this would happen,” a Lebanese analyst who has tracked the Syrian conflict since 2011 told me, speaking on background. “Everyone knew that if Assad fell without a managed transition, without security guarantees, without someone physically present to protect the Alawite population, this would happen. The question was always whether anyone would do anything about it. The answer, apparently, is no.”
THE BASE AT TARTUS
The Soviet naval facility at Tartus is the only permanent Soviet military installation in the Mediterranean. It has operated under a basing agreement with the Syrian government since 1971. That government no longer exists.
Soviet forces at Tartus have been accepting refugees since the second week of June, when the first families began arriving at the perimeter fence. They have provided water, food, basic medical care, and shelter — canvas enclosures, military-issue blankets, field rations supplemented by emergency supplies flown in from Hmeimim. They have not gone beyond the perimeter.
When I asked a Soviet military spokesperson at the base why Soviet forces had not intervened to stop the killings in the surrounding villages — some of which are visible from the base’s outer watchtowers — he gave an answer that was precise and, in its precision, devastating.
“We are here under a basing agreement with the Syrian Arab Republic,” he said. “The Syrian Arab Republic does not currently have a functioning government with which we have an operative agreement. We have no legal mandate to conduct operations on Syrian territory. We are doing what we can do, which is provide humanitarian assistance to people who reach our perimeter. We cannot go further than that without authorization we do not have.”
He paused.
“We can see the smoke,” he said. “From the watchtowers. We can see it.”
He did not say anything else on the subject.
Outside the perimeter, Umm Kareem’s enclosure is close enough to the base fence that she can see the Soviet flag from where she sleeps. I asked her what she thought when she first saw it.
“I thought: they are here,” she said. “I thought: we are safe now.”
She looked at the fence.
“They give us food,” she said. “They are kind to us. But they don’t go out there.” She gestured toward the hills, toward the smoke that was not visible today but had been yesterday. “They don’t go out there.”
WHAT THE WORLD IS DOING
The UN Security Council met in emergency session on July 8th. The Soviet Union called for an immediate ceasefire and the deployment of a multinational protection force. The United States and United Kingdom indicated support in principle but raised procedural concerns about mandate and composition. France called for an urgent investigation. The session ended without resolution.
A follow-up session is scheduled for July 17th.
In Washington, the State Department has issued four statements in six weeks condemning the violence in “the strongest possible terms.” Asked at a briefing on Friday whether stronger language would be accompanied by stronger action, spokesperson John Kirby said the administration was “actively reviewing all available options” and that “no option has been taken off the table.”
He was then asked whether any option had been put on the table.
He moved to the next question.
The European Union has pledged 200 million euros in humanitarian assistance and called for an emergency summit on the refugee crisis, which has already seen more than 400,000 Syrians cross into Lebanon and Turkey in the past six weeks, the fastest displacement in the conflict’s four-year history.
Israel has opened its northern border crossing for the first time to admit wounded civilians and has established a field hospital in the Golan. It has made no statement about the broader situation.
Iran, whose Hezbollah proxy fought alongside Assad’s forces for years, has been conspicuously silent.
THE ONES WHO DIDN’T REACH THE FENCE
Not everyone makes it to Tartus or Hmeimim.
The UN estimates that for every refugee who has reached the Soviet base perimeters, at least two more are displaced within Syria, moving through countryside where the killings are still ongoing, without the resources or the physical capacity to reach the coast.
Sister Maria Khoury, a Syrian Catholic nun who has been running a small clinic in a village twelve kilometers from Tartus for twenty years and has refused to leave, has been sending voice messages to contacts in Beirut that have been shared with BBC News. In the most recent, recorded three days ago, she describes conditions in the villages between her clinic and the Soviet perimeter.
“The people are walking at night,” she says, her voice steady in the way that people’s voices are steady when they are beyond the reach of ordinary fear. “They are afraid to walk in the day. The young men especially. The young men don’t make it. Mostly it is women and children and old people who arrive. The young men — ” She stops. “I am doing what I can. I don’t know how much longer.”
BBC News was unable to independently verify conditions in the areas she describes. We have passed her messages to the UN humanitarian coordinator’s office.
A NUMBER THAT KEEPS CHANGING
The UN figure of 38,000 to 52,000 dead is almost certainly an undercount. It is based on verified reports from humanitarian organizations, survivor testimony, and satellite imagery analysis of destroyed settlements. It does not include the villages that no one has yet been able to reach, the families for whom there are no survivors to report, the deaths that are happening now, today, while this article is being written and edited and published.
By the time you read this, the number will be different.
Umm Kareem does not know the number. She knows her husband. She knows her two youngest children, asleep now in the enclosure behind her. She knows that somewhere in the hills behind us, in the direction she will not look, her older children are either walking toward the coast or they are not.
“I keep thinking they will come,” she says. “Every time I see someone new arrive at the fence, I look. I think: maybe.”
She has been thinking that for five weeks.
The Soviet flag above the base moves in the afternoon wind off the Mediterranean. Forty kilometers away, and two kilometers away, and in villages whose names I am still learning to pronounce, the smoke rises and the people walk toward the sea and the soldiers stand at the perimeter and watch and cannot go further than that.
No intervention has come.
Siobhan Rafferty is BBC News Middle East Correspondent, based in Beirut. Additional reporting by Tariq Mansour, Beirut. Editing by Frances Gilmore, London.
© BBC 2015
Related sources: TASS: Assad Arrives in Moscow (June 2015)