Russia condemns Adra massacre, calls on world community to react [VIDEOS]

Dec 18, 2013, RT.com

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Russia’s Foreign Ministry has condemned massacre in the town of Adra, 20 kilometers north of Damascus. Survivors say jihadist rebel groups executed dozens of civilians, including children, beheading them or burning them alive.

“Moscow is convinced that such acts have to be decisively condemned and the international community should actively confront the perpetrators and financers of those acts,” Aleksandr Lukashevich, spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, said in a statement.

While the Syrian army continues its broad push to get the insurgents out of Adra, RT Arabic has gathered eyewitness accounts of what happened in the town last week, when it was captured by Islamist rebels of the Al-Nusra front and the Army of Islam.

Those who managed to flee the violence in Adra and reach Damascus say they saw the militants slaughtering Alawites, Druze, Christians and Shiites indiscriminately. Fearing their interviews might do harm to their relatives still in the occupied town, the fugitive survivors asked not to reveal their identities.

One of them told RT that all of the officials in the town were killed “no matter what religious groups they belonged to.”

“Among them were people who did not support any of the warring parties – neither the opposition nor the government. Nevertheless, they have been abused – they were terrorized and used as human shields,” the witness said.

There’s no reliable way at the moment to communicate with the people trapped inside Adra, but RT Arabic’s Abutaleb Albohaya, reporting from Damascus, cites the country’s officials as saying that “the atrocities against the civilian population are continuing.”

“What is happening in Adra is unthinkable,” one of the Adra escapees told RT. “Children are being slaughtered and thrown out of the windows. But no one is doing anything. The crisis in Syria continues in an environment where there is no international law, including those relating to the paramilitary operations.”

Human Rights Watch has been evaluating the reports coming out of Adra.

“I am afraid we cannot comment at this stage, as our research is still ongoing and it has been very difficult to get accurate information about what is happening in Adra and who is responsible for the abuses,” Lama Fakih, the watchdog’s Syria and Lebanon Researcher told RT in an e-mail.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has complained that Adra is inaccessible to its experts.

“We don’t have access to this area and can neither confirm nor deny any information circulating,” the ICRC said in a reply to RT’s request for comment.

The government in Damascus, meanwhile, wants to draw the UN’s attention to events in Adra. The Syrian Foreign Ministry sent a letter of complaint to the United Nations on Monday, saying that more than 100 people were massacred by the al-Nusra Front and the Islam Brigade in a suburb of the capital.

“Adra has seen some horrific crimes,” Nizar Skif, chairman of the Union of Lawyers in Syria, told RT. Among the atrocities, the lawyer said were reports of “sadism,” of people being “thrown into the furnaces” and “houses burned with people inside.”

Speaking in Brussels on Monday, Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, described the Adra massacre as outrageous. He said it was not the only evidence of brutality on the part of some of the rebel groups, which constitute the so-called Islamic Front, created as an alternative to the Free Syrian Army, which has positioned itself as a secular force, committed to keeping Syria a multi-religious society.

“The Islamic Front has proclaimed quite radical goals, although our western partners have been trying to establish ties with them and describe the front as an “acceptable power”, which possesses influence “on the ground,” Lavrov said at a press conference. “However, there’s some evidence which we consider reliable and which shows that when the front was being created, a possibility of Al-Nusra joining in was discussed. That did not happen only to save the front’s reputation, as Al-Nusra has been on terrorist organizations’ lists in the US and Europe.”

Lavrov expressed his concern over the possibility that the Islamic Front could be ideologically close to Al-Nusra, now that the US mediators of the Geneva-2 peace talks on Syria, set for January 22, have been meeting with the front’s representatives, trying to “somehow get them “under the umbrella” of the Free Syrian Army”.

With new groups within the Syrian opposition having lately “sprung up like mushrooms” according to Lavrov, Russia has been particularly concerned with who exactly is going to negotiate peace with the Syrian government at the so-called Geneva-2 peace conference.

 

SEE ALSO: Militants’ Massacre: Syrian rebels execute civilians as govt forces close in, Dec 17, 2013

 

‘Slaughtered like sheep’: Eyewitnesses recount massacre in Adra, Syria

New details of atrocities carried out by Islamist rebel fighters in the town of Adra, 20 kilometers north of Damascus, continue to pour in from survivors of the massacre there, in which reportedly at least 80 people lost their lives.

“The decapitators” is how the Adra residents, who managed to flee the violence there, now call the people who currently have the town under their control. Adra, a town with a population of 20,000, was captured by Islamist rebels from the Al-Nusra front and the Army of Islam last week, following fierce fighting with the government forces. The town’s seizure was accompanied by mass executions of civilians.

Following alarming reports of the massacre, RT contacted international rights groups including the Human Rights Watch (HRW), Amnesty International, as well as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). However, none of them were able to provide any information.

While the HRW told RT that it “cannot comment at this stage as our research is still ongoing and it has been very difficult to get accurate information about what is happening in Adra and who is responsible for the abuses,” the ICRC said they “don’t have access to this area and can neither confirm nor deny any information circulating.”

RT Arabic has managed to speak to some of the eyewitnesses of the atrocities. Most of them have fled the town, leaving their relatives and friends behind, so they asked not to be identified in the report for security reasons.

An Adra resident said he escaped from the town “under a storm of bullets.” He later contacted his colleagues, who described how the executions of civilians were carried out by the militants.

“They had lists of government employees on them,” the man told RT. “This means they had planned for it beforehand and knew who works in the governmental agencies. They went to the addresses they had on their list, forced the people out and subjected them to the so-called “Sharia trials.” I think that’s what they call it. They sentenced them to death by beheading.”

A woman, hiding her face from the camera, told RT of the beheadings she had seen.

“There was slaughter everywhere,” she said. “The eldest was only 20 years old; he was slaughtered. They were all children. I saw them with my own eyes. They killed fourteen people with a machete. I don’t know if these people were Alawites. I don’t know why they were slaughtered. They grabbed them by their heads and slaughtered them like sheep.”

It’s been reported that 80 civilians were killed in the massacre. The death toll could still grow, as currently the information coming from Adra is scarce. The town has been surrounded and isolated by the Syrian army, who have been trying to force the extremists out.

“Civilians told us that the workers of an Adra bakery were all executed and burned during the first hours of the attack. Whole families were massacred. We do not have an exact estimation of the number because we are unable to get into the town, but the number is high,” Kinda Shimat, Syria’s Social Affairs Minister, told RT.

Details of the executions are trickling out of the town as eyewitnesses tell their stories.

“They killed everyone at the Adra Ummalia police station,” another fugitive from the town told RT. “And they killed everyone at the Adra Ummalia hospital where my sister works. She stayed alive only because she didn’t show up for work that day. There are about 200 people at the police station. They are civilians. The militants are hiding among them, using them as a shield to prevent the Army from bombing the police.”

The events in Adra are a further example of the shift that has taken place within the Syrian rebel forces which has lately been dominated by Islamist extremists, according to Michel Chossudovsky, director of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

“The so-called moderate opposition forces are virtually non-existent from the military standpoint,” Chossudovsky told RT. “The only force which has funding and weapons are the Islamists, particularly Al-Nusra. And their rebel brigades are the ones committing atrocities. The divisions are occurring precisely because segments of the opposition realize that these terrorist brigades do not belong to the so-called opposition movement.”

Both the Adra massacre and the latest Aleppo bombing have signaled the escalation of violence in the war-torn country ahead of the UN-mediated continuously postponed peace talks on Syria, now set to take place in Geneva on January 22.

On Monday, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called for a ceasefire ahead of the talks.

“We must have a cessation of hostilities before we begin political dialogue on Syria in Geneva,” he said.