On 13 July, massacres carried out in Suwaida (Sweida) city center and its villages by SNA (Syrian National Army), Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), and ISIS gangs resulted in the deaths of over a thousand innocent people. These attacks and killings were not just isolated incidents but the continuation of years of ongoing suffering.
Eyewitnesses and families of those who lost loved ones spoke to ANF.
Malik Hadi Hemdan, a resident of the El Jalaa neighborhood in Suwaida, said that the neighborhood was defenseless in the face of the gang attacks. He said: “al-Jolani (Ahmet al-Sharaa) forces came to Suwaida under the pretense of defending and securing the city, but their real intent was theft, looting, and murder. Government-backed forces attacked us and our neighborhood with heavy weapons and machine guns. Despite our limited resources, we tried to resist these gangs. They committed similar massacres in other neighborhoods. What they did is barbaric and has nothing to do with humanity or morality. They launched a major assault against us, but thanks to the perseverance of our youth and people, we repelled the al-Jolani gangs and drove them out of Suwaida.”
“They didn’t let us retrieve the bodies”
Rena Kiwan from Suwaida recounted how her husband, Mihemed Seqir El Berbor, and her brother were executed in front of her eyes by regime-affiliated gangs.
Speaking to ANF, Rena Kiwan described the night of the attack as follows: “In the evening, I was at home with my child. Around 2:30 a.m., they first came and checked the house but found nothing and left. They returned around 5:00 a.m. and started searching my husband’s brother’s house, then entered ours. They asked if we had any weapons, but there were none in the house.
They took our phones and dragged my husband and brother outside and beat them in front of the house. Then they came back, took my husband, his brother, their sons, and my son to the basement and locked the door on them. They stayed there for hours. They later took them out of the basement and began interrogating my husband and his brother. They claimed they wanted to talk, but instead took them outside, locked the door on us, and executed them both before our eyes.
They came back again and tried to take my son, who is in 9th grade. This time we resisted. We tried to retrieve my husband’s body, but they wouldn’t let us. They threatened us and said, ‘You’re not going outside.’”
Source: ANF News
