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Those who’ve fled Syria want only one result from Geneva, an end to Assad’s rule
Those who’ve fled Syria want only one result from Geneva, an end to Assad’s rule
By Roy Gutman (McClatchy Foreign Staff), Star Telegram, 29 Jan 2014
REYHANLI, Turkey — (…) The destruction and the killings have permanently scarred a great many Syrians and alienated them from the regime. Others are in a state of shock – or terror – over the seemingly random massacres of civilians who just happened to enter a regime checkpoint at a moment when security personnel decide to grab them. Professional prosecutors and forensic experts who defected from the government on Wednesday revealed the first results of an investigation into one of the biggest such massacres – the deaths of 220 people killed outside Aleppo starting in late January 2012. Their bodies were thrown into the Qwig River.
The gruesome photographs presented at an Istanbul news conference showed that most of the victims had their hands and feet bound, many bore signs of torture, and a number were emaciated, having apparently starved before they were killed. Executions were mostly by hanging or a shot to the head. The victims were aged 11 to 70, and included five women, whom the investigators said had been raped and tortured before they were killed. Forensic investigators were able to identify 60 of the corpses, and all appeared to be locals from villages north of Aleppo who were living in opposition-held areas and were going to their jobs, unarmed, in regime-held areas.
“All the victims were civilians,” said Niccolo Figa-Talamanca of the No Peace Without Justice, an advocacy group founded by Emma Bonino, Italy’s current foreign minister, which helped in the investigation. “They included vegetable sellers who crossed the line of control to purchase and sell vegetables, factory workers who lived in areas not under regime control and worked in areas under control of the regime, shopkeepers and similar professions whose jobs required them to cross the line of control,” he said.