{"id":264,"date":"2011-05-26T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-05-26T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","slug":"","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dchrs.org\/?p=264","title":{"rendered":"Syrians fleeing the town of Tell Kalakh tell of attacks"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n <\/span>Syrians fleeing the town of Tell Kalakh tell of attacks<\/strong><\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\nBy Amnesty
\nInternational researcher Cilina Nasser in Wadi Khaled, northern Lebanon.
\nEveryone who has fled the Syrian western town of Tell Kalakh and sought shelter
\nin villages on the Lebanese side of the border is scared. None of the people I
\nspoke to gave me their names and nor did I ask. At the end of every interview,
\neach would say: “Do not publish my name.” <\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\nThey are
\nafraid because they hope to go back to their homes in Tell Kalakh, or what is left
\nof their homes, and they do not want to be punished by the Syrian forces for recounting
\nwhat has happened to them. Many families left Tell Kalakh on Saturday 14 May after
\nwaking to find Syrian troops positioned at the entrances to the town. Shooting
\nbegan shortly afterwards and at least three people were wounded, including one
\nwho arrived dead at a hospital on the Lebanese side of the border. <\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\nOn at least
\ntwo occasions, Syrian forces or groups loyal to President Bashar al-Assad
\nopened fire at fleeing families, injuring individuals among them. I spoke to a
\n35-year-old woman who was shot in the lower leg as she, members of her family
\nand another family from Tell Kalakh were heading to the Lebanese border, all
\ncrammed into her brother’s car. She was sitting in the backseat with her
\nsister-in-law on her lap, while a neighbour held her six-year-old son. There
\nwere eight of them in total in the car.<\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\nThey had left
\ntheir town and were travelling on the main road heading to al-‘Aarida, a Syrian
\ntown where they could park their car on the Syrian side and cross a bridge over
\nal-Kabir River into Lebanon. Minutes outside Tal Kalakh, near the village of Mashta Mahli, the road was blocked with
\nbig stones so the woman’s brother, who was driving,  <\/span>swerved to miss the stones and drove over the
\npebbles next to them. At this point they came under fire. <\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\nThe
\n35-year-old woman recalled: “I immediately felt like a knife had pierced my
\nflesh and felt warm liquid running down my leg. I realized that I was hit by a
\nbullet. I was bleeding so much that my sister-in-law thought that she was also
\ninjured because she could feel my blood running onto her feet.” <\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\nHer brother
\nsped off until they reached al-‘Aarida, where she was carried over the bridge and
\nimmediately taken to hospital in north Lebanon where she was treated.<\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\nThey would not
\nbe the last family to come under attack.<\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\nThat night,
\nseven-year-old Munira and her twin brother, Mohamed, were injured while fleeing
\nwith dozens of families who had packed themselves into a 16-metre trailer truck.
\nTheir mother told me: “The truck was transporting families to the border and we
\nthought of going but were scared. When the truck came back safely and wanted to
\ntake more families, we decided to go.”<\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\nThe trailer
\ntruck came under fire when it reached the same location on the road next to the
\nvillage of Mashta Mahli. Munira was shot three times: in her backside, her
\nright thigh and her foot. Mohamed was shot in his lower leg. Their mother told
\nme that she heard a woman screaming that her child was also wounded but that she
\nwas too busy with her own children and couldn’t find out what had happened to
\nthe other child.<\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\nFamilies in Tell
\nKalakh told me the town was heavily shelled on the three days that followed.
\nMohamed Majed al-Akkari, a man in his 40s suffering from paralysis on his right
\nside, was killed by the shelling on 16 May, according to his cousin. He showed
\nme footage of Mohamed Majed al-Akkari’s body lying on the floor of the house
\nwith a round ice block placed on top of him, as it was too unsafe to take his
\nbody to the morgue – the army had been in control of the town’s hospital since
\n14 May. He was eventually buried in the garden because it was also too unsafe
\nto take him to the graveyard. <\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\nWitnesses told
\nme that soldiers took full control of Tell Kalakh’s neighbourhoods and streets
\non Tuesday 17 May after apparently crushing resistance from armed elements in
\nthe town. They detained a large number of men, young and old. <\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\nI visited displaced
\nSyrian families staying in the homes of Lebanese relatives and friends in northern
\nLebanon, mainly in villages in a border area called Wadi Khaled where they
\nenjoy strong family and trade ties. <\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\nA lot of the
\ntrade is illegal. Just like in many border areas around the world, smuggling of
\ngoods is the main source of income for the families. People in Tell Kalakh are
\nSunni Muslims who claim they have been discriminated against by the Syrian state,
\nwhich, they say, allocates good jobs in the public sector to members of the Alawite
\nMuslim minority who dominate the area surrounding Tal Kalakh. They say smuggling
\ngoods to and from Lebanon
\nis their only alternative means of income.<\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\nUp to 180 men suspected
\nof smuggling are currently reported to be held in incommunicado detention, most
\nof them arrested in the past couple of years. It was this that initially drove
\nthe people of Tell Kalakh to come out onto the streets in late March. It was
\nonly after 19 April, around three weeks after the first demonstration was held there,
\nthat they started calling for the fall of the regime. <\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\nOne of those
\nheld incommunicado is the son of a displaced woman in her 60s who fled Tell
\nKalakh on 16 May. She said her son was arrested more than a year ago for
\nsmuggling goods between Lebanon
\nand Syria
\nand since then she hasn’t heard from him. She said she did not care about what
\nwould happen to her for speaking with an international organization but that
\nshe was worried her son would bear the consequences. <\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\n“Please, do
\nnot publish my name,” she pleaded.<\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\n <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\n <\/span>Syrians fleeing the town of Tell Kalakh tell of attacks<\/strong><\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\nBy Amnesty
\nInternational researcher Cilina Nasser in Wadi Khaled, northern Lebanon.
\nEveryone who has fled the Syrian western town of Tell Kalakh and sought shelter
\nin villages on the Lebanese side of the border is scared. None of the people I
\nspoke to gave me their names and nor did I ask. At the end of every interview,
\neach would say: “Do not publish my name.” <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dchrs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dchrs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dchrs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dchrs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dchrs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dchrs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dchrs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dchrs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dchrs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}