In this week’s Spectator, BBC journalist Paul Wood talks to Syrian revolutionaries who have deserted the Free Syrian Army in outrage at the atrocities the rebels are committing against ordinary people. He meets one man who left Damascus after doubts he had been nurturing about the FSA culminated in the realisation that their brigades in the city were ‘not fighting for freedom any more’. Wood writes:
Ghadi, a tall young man of about 30, had helped to run a centre collecting food for refugees. But FSA fighters arrived, and without apology or explanation piled the food into a pick-up truck and drove off. This was the final straw for Ghadi, but he’d had doubts about the ‘resistance’ for months.
As a ‘citizen journalist’, he followed the FSA, camera in hand. one day the local commander led him down into a basement and said: ‘Look at this.’ Ghadi’s video shows five men sitting, all rigid with fear, stripped to the waist, blindfolded, hands bound behind their backs. Ugly bruises cover most of their upper bodies. They had been seized from a suburb loyal to the government. They included a clerk in the foreign ministry, a new recruit to an artillery regiment and a secondary school headmaster.
The headmaster’s dignity had long gone, his comb-over pointing in all directions. The commander smoothed the wisps of hair. The man shrank like a beaten dog. ‘Haven’t we treated you well?’ said the commander. Then he kicked him under the chin, snapping his head back. ‘These are all spies,’ he declared.
By the standards of Syrian atrocity videos, this was more creepy than shocking. But what had upset Ghadi was that the commander wasn’t at all worried he was filming — he wanted him to show the basement.
Speaking out was not a popular move. ‘People are always telling you, “It’s not the time to talk about what’s going wrong; it’s the time to fight the regime”,’ said Ghadi. ‘But I believe that if you truly want to fight Bashar, you must correct what the FSA is doing on the ground. I feel so angry. I am not asking for a revolution that’s 100 per cent clean and pure. But the FSA brigades in Damascus are not fighting for freedom any more. The FSA has lost the trust of the people.’
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Tags: Syria