[lbo-talk] The Burial Brigade of Homs

[Wojtek S]

Hussein can barely remember the first time he executed someone. It was
probably in a cemetery in the evening, or at night; he can't recall
exactly. It was definitely mid-October of last year, and the man was
Shiite, for sure. He had confessed to killing women -- decent women,
whose husbands and sons had protested against Syrian President Bashar
Assad's regime. So the rebels had decided that the man, a soldier in
the Syrian army, deserved to die, too.

Hussein didn't care if the man had been beaten into a confession, or
that he was terrified of death and had begun to stammer prayers. It
was his tough luck that the rebels had caught him. Hussein took out
his army knife and sliced the kneeling man's neck. His comrades from
the so-called "burial brigade" quickly interred the blood-stained
corpse in the sand of the graveyard west of the Baba Amr area of the
rebel stronghold of Homs. At the time, the neighborhood was in the
hands of the insurgents.
That first execution was a rite of passage for Hussein. He now became
a member of the Homs burial brigade. The men, of which there are only
a handful, kill in the name of the Syrian revolution. They leave
torture to others; that's what the so-called interrogation brigade is
for. "They do the ugly work," says Hussein, who is currently being
treated in a hospital in the Lebanese city of Tripoli. He was injured
when a piece of shrapnel became lodged in his back during the army's
ground invasion of Baba Amr in early March.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,824603,00.html

-- 
Wojtek
http://wsokol.blogspot.com/