Syria through the sniper’s sights

BEIRUT, Lebanon — “Being told by officers to kill peaceful and unarmed civilians is the most brutal thing that ever happened to me.”

Speaking by phone from his exile in neighboring Turkey, a defected Syrian sniper has described to GlobalPost details of his deployment to Izra, 30 kilometers northeast of Daraa, the southern Syrian city that has been the cradle of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

GlobalPost spoke twice to the defected former sniper, a member of the special forces of the army’s Division 47, and has seen his military ID and other personal details. The soldier asked to remain anonymous fearing reprisals by the regime against his family, which still lives inside Syria.

His testimony has been corroborated by that gathered separately by Insan, a leading Syrian human rights organization and Avaaz, the global campaign group.

“The decision to desert the army was a life and death decision for me,” said the former sniper. “It was impossible for me to continue watching people dropping dead in front of my eyes every day — even if they were not killed by me.”

SYRIA: A Syrian soldier tells it like it is

On Sept. 18, a Jordanian official confirmed for the first time that the Kingdom had offered sanctuary to 60 defected Syrian military personnel.

The sniper told GlobalPost that he and fellow soldiers were told by their commanding officers that they were being deployed from Damascus to Daraa province on April 25 in order to protect civilians there from “terrorist gangs.”

“We were told that there were demonstrations in Daraa and we had to protect the demonstrators from terrorists and foreign elements who were threatening them,” he said.

“The week before we arrived in Daraa our officers gave us strict orders to spend every evening from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. watching Al Dunya TV. They said we would hear about the conspiracy against Syria,” he said.

Al Dunya TV is Syria’s only private satellite channel and is majority-owned by President’s Assad’s first cousin and the country’s wealthiest businessman, Rami Makhlouf. In June the station hosted the pro-regime analyst Dr. Taleb Ibrahim, who called on Syrians to kill protestors.

“We all believed what we saw on Dunya TV and we were eager to go and kill those people, especially after watching the reports from Daraa,” the former sniper said.

“It was propaganda showing gangsters and salafis [Muslim fundamentalists], opening fire on the army, the secret police and civilians and we were told that they were being paid by foreign forces to kill civilians.”

The sniper said his barracks in Izra were in a remote location and the soldiers were kept isolated from the outside world.

“We had orders not to talk to civilians. We had no access to TV, newspapers, radio or the internet. Our only source of news was our officers. During the morning meetings they would repeat the conspiracies against Syria, such as people being planted by foreign forces among protesters to kill civilians and soldiers. They would tell us about Bashar’s achievements and the good things he has done for country.

“They would say: ‘Of course we will not accept protesters calling for the toppling of our beloved President Bashar al-Assad. Those people chanting like this are hired by foreign forces and we should get rid of them.’”

Four times each week the men would drive south from their base in Izra into Daraa with orders to crackdown on the protestors. The 47th Division was composed of about 100 men, he said, including six snipers who were told to take to rooftops of tall buildings around key protest areas of the city.

GlobalPost in Daraa: How it all began

Other divisions joined the 47th, he said, including the Fourth Division under the command of Maher al-Assad, who the sniper said was in overall command of the military assault in Daraa.

“All the divisions in Izra and Daraa were under the direct leadership of Maher al- Assad. All officers took orders directly from him. I know this because I often overheard officers asking each other if they had received this or that order from Maher and asking each other what he said about this or that.”

The sniper said that during the early days of the deployment, while the regular soldiers were told to shoot in the air to break up protests, the snipers were given orders to shoot to kill.

“We were ordered to aim for the head or heart from the beginning. We were not given specific numbers but told to kill as many as possible as long as there were protests,” he said.

However, what met the sniper on his first mission to Daraa was in stark contrast to what he had been told to expect.

“It took us a couple of days to understand that the people we had been told were terrorists were just normal citizens protesting peacefully and we discovered that it was our officers that were the criminals,” he said. “When I got there I didn’t see anything except peaceful protesters. So I decided I would not shoot at them.”

The consequences of not following orders were dire. The sniper described how a soldier he knew as Wael had refused to shoot at unarmed protesters, disobeying a direct order.

“He had an argument with his officer saying that he would not point his gun at unarmed people,” the sniper said.

“During the night something happened. The next morning we were told that Wael had been killed by terrorists who had snuck inside the barracks. It was strange because the barracks are closely guarded and we had never heard about a terrorist attack on barracks before. We all knew he had been killed by our commanders.”

By mid May, the sniper had seen enough. He began to discuss the possibility of defecting with a group of soldiers he discovered were also from his home region of northeast Syria.

“In the military the soldiers given orders to kill are never from the region the orders are given in,” he said.

“We discovered we all came from roughly the same area and since they used to send us together on missions in Daraa we started to trust each other and to talk to each other about the situation. And then we began to discuss defecting.”

SYRIA: Soldiers in Syria defect

But the soldiers’ barracks at Izra was under the close scrutiny of the secret police.

“Whenever they [secret police] would come and join our group, when we sat around talking after the missions in Daraa, we would always change the subject or answer them with what they wanted to hear,” he said.

There had already been defections from the Daraa deployment, said the sniper, even before he began discussing it.

“I heard about many soldiers who defected from Daraa. Maybe around 100 to 150. Usually soldiers would defect during their missions in Daraa city. They would just drop their weapons and run towards the protesters. Some also fled the barracks at night.”

The defected soldiers were all privates, not officers, he said.

Officers slept in separate barracks and got the best food. By contrast, the sniper said, the regular soldiers would receive only bread and water and sometimes not even that. One time the water had worms in it, he said.

With no end in sight to the killing, the sniper said he agreed with 20 other soldiers that the time had come to flee.

At 10 p.m. on the night of May 25, the men handed in their weapons as usual and retired to their beds. But after lights out the men gathered at an agreed location and sneaked out of the barracks onto the road.

A small group, including the sniper, went ahead to flag down a vehicle. The first to pass was a truck, driven by an old man. At first reluctant to pick up his dangerous cargo, the old man relented after half an hour of tense negotiations, driving the men the 100 kilometers north to Damascus, where the group split up.

A few days later the defected sniper was in Turkey, where dozens of other defected soldiers, including senior commanders, have sought refuge.

“I feel better now with my friends in exile, but not as good as I would if I was with my own family,” he said.

“I call them every day to see if they are OK. No one has asked for me yet but I am so afraid for my family because of what I did. But it was the only decision I could take.”