Isis Slaughter in the Sacred
Syrian City of Palmyra: The Survivors' Stories
We’ve heard about the threat to the monuments - but what about the human
tragedy?
By Robert Fisk
June 07, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "The
Independent" -
When the black-cowled gunmen of the 'Islamic State' infiltrated the suburbs
of Palmyra on 20 May, half of Assad Sulieman’s oil and gas processing plant
crews – 50 men in all - were manning their 12-hour shift at the Hayan oil
field 28 miles away. They were the lucky ones. Their 50 off-duty colleagues
were sleeping at their homes next to the ancient Roman city. Twenty-five of
them would soon be dead, among up to 400 civilians – including women and
children – who would die in the coming hours at the hands of the Islamist
militia which every Syrian now calls by its self-styled acronym ‘Daesh’.
Oil engineer ‘Ahmed’ – he chose this name to protect his
family in Palmyra – was, by chance, completing a course at Damascus
University on the fatal day when Palmyra fell. “I was appalled,” he
said. “I tried calling my family. It was still possible to get through
on the phone. They said ‘Daesh’ (also known as Isis) wasn’t allowing
anyone to leave their home. My brother later went onto the street. He
took pictures of bodies. They had been decapitated, all men.
Destruction of the Jezaa
gas and oil processing plant
“He managed to send the photographs out to me from
[the Isis-controlled city of] Raqqa on the internet which is the only
communications working there.”
Some of the photographs are too terrible to publish.
They show heads lying several feet from torsos, blood running in streams
across a city street. In one, a body lies on a roadway while two men
cycle past on a bicycle. So soon after the capture of Palmyra were the
men slaughtered that shop-fronts can still be seen in the photographs,
painted in the two stars and colours of the red-white-and-black flag of
the Syrian government.
“The Daesh forced the people to leave the bodies in
the streets for three days,” Ahmed continued. “They were not allowed to
pick up the bodies or bury them without permission. The corpses were all
over the city. My family said the Daesh came to our house, two foreign
men – one appeared to be an Afghan, the other from Tunisia or Morocco
because he had a very heavy accent – and then they left. They killed
three female nurses. One was killed in her home, another in her uncle’s
house, a third on the street. Perhaps it was because they helped the
army [as nurses]. Some said they were beheaded but my brother said they
were shot in the head.”
In the panic to flee Palmyra, others perished when their cars
drove over explosives planted on the roads by the Islamist gunmen. One was a
retired Syrian general from the al-Daas family whose 40-year old pharmacist wife
and 12-year old son were killed with him when their car’s wheels touched the
explosives. Later reports spoke of executions in the old Roman theatre amid the
Palmyra ruins.
The director of the Hayan gas and oil processing plant, Assad
Sulieman, shook his head in near-disbelief as he recounted how word reached him
of the execution of his off-duty staff. Some were, he believes, imprisoned in
the gas fields which had fallen into the hands of the ‘Islamic State’. Others
were merely taken from their homes and murdered because they were government
employees. For months prior to the fall of Palmyra, he had received a series of
terrifying phone calls from the Islamists, one of them when gunmen were
besieging a neighbouring gas plant.
He said: “They came on my own phone, here in my office, and
said: ‘We are coming for you.’ I said to them: ‘I will be waiting’. The army
drove them off but my staff also received these phone calls here and they were
very frightened. The army protected three of our fields then and drove them
off.” Since the fall of Palmyra, the threatening phone calls have continued,
even though 'Daesh' have cut all mobile and landlines in their newly-occupied
city.
Another young engineer at Hayan was in Palmyra when the
'Islamic State' arrived. So fearful was he when he spoke that he even refused to
volunteer a name for himself. “I had gone back to Palmyra two days before and
everything seemed alright,” he said. “When my family told me they had arrived, I
stayed at home and so did my mother and brother and sisters and we did not go
out. Everyone knew that when these men come, things are not good. The
electricity stopped for two days and then the gunmen restored it. We had plenty
of food – we were a well-off family. We stayed there a week, we had to sort out
our affairs and they never searched our home.”
The man’s evidence proved the almost haphazard nature of Isis
rule. A week after the occupation, the family made its way out of the house –
the women in full Islamic covering – and caught a bus to the occupied city of
Raqqa and from there to Damascus. “They looked at my ID but didn’t ask my job,”
the man said. “The bus trip was normal. No-one stopped us leaving.” Like Ahmed,
the young oil worker was a Sunni Muslim – the same religion as ‘Daesh’s’
followers – but he had no doubts about the nature of Palmyra’s occupiers. “When
they arrive anywhere”, he said, “there is no more life”.
Syria’s own oil and gas lifeline now stretches across a
hundred miles of desert from Homs in the midlands to the strategic oil fields
across the broiling desert outside Palmyra. It took two hours to reach a point
28 miles from Palmyra; the last Syrian troops are stationed eight miles closer
to the city.
To the west lies the great Syrian air base of Tiyas –
codenamed ‘T-4’ after the old fourth pumping station of the Iraqi-Palestine oil
pipeline – where I saw grey-painted twin-tailed Mig fighter bombers taking off
into the dusk and settling back onto the runways. A canopy of radar dishes and
concrete bunkers protect the base and Syrian troops can be seen inside a series
of earthen fortresses on each side of the main road to Palmyra, defending their
redoubts with heavy machine guns, long-range artillery and missiles.
Syrian troops patrol the highway every few minutes on pick-up
trucks – and make no secret of their precautions. They pointed out the site of
an improvised explosive device found a few hours earlier - more than 30 miles
west of Palmyra. Further down the road was the wreckage of truck bombs which had
been hit by Syrian rocket-fire. Assad Sulieman, the gas plant director, declares
that his father named him after President Bashar al-Asasad’s father Hafez. He
described how Islamist rebels had totally destroyed one gas plant close to Hayan
last year, and how his crews had totally restored it to production within months
by using cannibalized equipment from other facilities. His plant’s production
capacity has been restored to three million cubic metres of gas per day for the
country’s power stations and six thousand barrels of oil for the Homs refinery.
But the man who understands military risks is General Fouad –
like everyone else in the area of Palmyra, he prefers to use only his first name
– a professional officer whose greatest victory over the rebels on a nearby
mountain range came at the moment his soldier-son was killed in battle in Homs.
He makes no secret of “the big shock” he felt when Palmyra fell. He thinks that
the soldiers had been fighting for a long time in defence of the city and did
not expect the mass attack. Other military men – not the general – say that the
‘Islamic State’ advanced on a 50-mile front, overwhelming the army at the time.
“They will get no further,” General Fouad said. “We fought
them off when they attacked three fields last year. Our soldiers stormed some of
their local headquarters on the Shaer mountain. We found documents about our
production facilities, we found religious books of Takfiri ideas. And we found
lingerie.”
What on earth, I asked, would the Islamic State be doing with
lingerie? The general was not smiling. “We think that maybe they kept captured
Yazidi women with them, the ones who were kidnapped in Iraq. When our soldiers
reached their headquarters, we saw some of their senior men running away with
some women.”
But the general, like almost every other Syrian officer I met
on this visit to the desert – and every other civilian – had a thought on his
mind. If the Americans were so keen to destroy Isis, did they not know from
satellites that thousands of gunmen were massing to strike at Palmyra. Certainly
they did not tell the Syrians of this? And they did not bomb them, either –
though there must have been targets aplenty for the US air force in the days
before the Palmyra attack, even if Washington does not like the Assad regime. A
question, then, that still has to be answered.
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