Hama Massacre - Attack By Government Forces

Attack By Government Forces

According to author Patrick Seale, "every party worker, every paratrooper sent to Hama knew that this time Islamic militancy had to be torn out of the city, whatever the cost..." The military was mobilized, and president Hafez al-Assad sent Rifaat's special forces (the Defense companies), elite army units and Mukhabarat agents to the city. Before the attack, the Syrian government called for the city's surrender and warned that anyone remaining in the city would be considered a rebel. Besieged by 12,000 troops, the fighting in Hama lasted for three weeks – the first week "in regaining control of the town," and the last two "in hunting down the insurgents." Robert Fisk, in his book Pity the Nation, described how civilians were fleeing Hama while tanks and troops were moving towards the city's outskirts to start the siege. He cites reports of high numbers of deaths and shortages of food and water from fleeing civilians and from soldiers.

According to Amnesty International, the Syrian military bombed the old city center from the air to facilitate the entry of infantry and tanks through the narrow streets; buildings were demolished by tanks during the first four days of fighting. Large parts of the old city were destroyed. There are also unsubstantiated reports of use of hydrogen cyanide by the government forces. After encountering fierce resistance, Rifaat's forces ringed the city with artillery and shelled it for three weeks.

After the initial attacks, military and internal security personnel were dispatched to comb through the rubble for surviving members of the Muslim Brotherhood and their sympathizers. Torture and mass executions of suspected rebel sympathizers ensued, killing many thousands over several weeks. Rifaat, suspecting that rebels were still hiding in tunnels under the old city, had diesel fuel pumped into them and set ablaze and stationed T-72 tanks at the tunnel entrances to shell people trying to escape from the tunnels.

Read more about this topic:  Hama Massacre

Famous quotes containing the words attack, government and/or forces:

    Adolescents swing from euphoric self-confidence and a kind of narcissistic strength in which they feel invulnerable and even immortal, to despair, self-emptiness, self-deprecation. At the same time they seem to see an emerging self that is unique and wonderful, they suffer an intense envy which tears narcissism into shreds, and makes other people’s qualities hit them like an attack of lasers.
    Terri Apter (20th century)

    A government deriving its energy from the will of the society, and operating, by the reason of its measures, on the understanding and interest of the society ... is the government for which philosophy has been searching and humanity been fighting from the most remote ages ... which it is the glory of America to have invented, and her unrivalled happiness to possess.
    James Madison (1751–1836)

    This declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I can not but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world ... and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty.
    Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)