It’s becoming increasingly clear in Syria that the Assad regime has adopted a strategy of total war to stave off its collapse. If the claims made by opposition activists are true, last weekend’s mass executions of as many as four hundred suspected rebels and civilians, including children, by regime forces in the town of Daraya near Damascus, was the single largest atrocity yet committed in the eighteen-month-old conflict. There is no reason to believe that it will be the last. In this kind of war, it’s not about winning hearts and minds. This is old-school: you don’t try to win over your enemies and their family members, you kill them.
If there were ever gloves on in the regime’s response to unrest, they have now definitely come off. Indeed, everything about Syria’s carnage has acquired an exponential quality, including the death toll, which now must be rapidly approaching twenty-one thousand. Around two hundred people, mostly civilians, are reportedly dying every day now, twice as many as in June. Until Daraya, the hallmark horror was the May 25th massacre of a hundred and eight civilians in the town of Houla. The new standard is four times that.
What happened in Daraya follows a pattern that is becoming chillingly routine. Last Saturday, after a withering five-day bombardment, Syrian Army forces entered Daraya and conducted a “mopping-up” operation. What occurred there can only be imagined, but the results are visible in YouTube videos that have been uploaded by activists in the days since then: hundreds of bodies piled up inside houses, in basements, and in a mosque. Many of the bodies were those of young men of fighting age, but there were also children there, and at least one toddler. Many of the victims, as in so many other body-dumps showing up in the environs of Damascus in recent weeks, bore the telltale signs of bullets to the head, fired close-up, execution-style.
Until last February, when the burgeoning conflict centered on the city of Homs, the regime’s battle tactic was primarily to cordon off and devastate rebel areas with howitzers and tanks and, where it could, with the kind of individual terror that could be visited upon vulnerable civilians by its paramilitary thugs, the shabiha. It was shabiha, working in tandem with Army units, who carried out the Houla massacre.
But during the spring, and the hemorrhaging chaos of the long Homs siege—and assaults on Hama and other cities too—the regime began what has become a steady escalation of the conflict by introducing to the battlefield its Russian-made helicopter gunships. Though this was sure to mean a rapid increase in the civilian death toll, it did not represent a red line for the hand-wringing policymakers in Western capitals, who had allowed the futile diplomatic efforts of Kofi Annan to stand in place of any concerted action by their governments. Nor did the killings in Houla.
So the regime felt free to begin another escalation after the spectacular July 18th rebel bombing of an intelligence building in Damascus, in which four of Assad’s top security advisors were killed. That strike—which was accompanied by audacious rebel assaults into the heart of Damascus and Aleppo, where fighting has continued ever since—has been countered by the introduction of the regime’s jet fighters into the conflict. The initial appearance of a sole MiG over Aleppo in the last week of July has been followed up by daily air strikes against rebel positions, and civilian targets: hospitals where the wounded are being treated, bakeries where Syrians queue up for their morning bread, and civilian neighborhoods where the families of rebels live.
It is a cruel tactic, as old as war itself, to target the homes of enemy warriors so as to weaken them on the battlefield. But the surging numbers of civilian refugees fleeing into neighboring Turkey since the air strikes began with a vengeance two weeks ago are a testament to its brutal efficacy, especially when modernized, as it has been here, with unbridled combat air power.
Where the regime still has sufficient ground forces and the ability to deploy them as killing squads into target neighborhoods, it is doing so, usually after withering bombing and shelling assaults. This appears to be what happened in Daraya, which had been perceived as a rebel stronghold, and was taught a lesson for its stubborn resistance. The leaflets now being dropped on other Damascus neighborhoods are printed with messages urging rebels to give up or face “inevitable death.” What happened in Daraya is not mentioned on the leaflets; there is no need.
Read more from Jon Lee Anderson about the Syrian conflict.
Photograph by Shaam News Network/AP Photo.
