'When the protests against the Assad régime began in Damascus on March 15, 2011, the officer Ahmed al-Matar did not know what to believe. Around 200 young people gathered peacefully in the Syrian capital and shouted: "Only Allah, Syria and freedom." But Matar and his comrades were not allowed to leave their barracks and only learned what their superiors were telling them: "They told us that foreign terrorists had penetrated to kill and destroy the country," says Matar, who is now in exile in the Lebanese port city of Tripoli.
By then, the spirit of freedom had been around Tunisia, Egypt and Libya for months. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was warned and decided to crush any protest by force of arms. As early as December, the régime warned officers across the country against attacks by radical Islamists. The régime even described peaceful demonstrators as part of a foreign conspiracy.
The brutality of the insecure régime was evident in the southern city of Daraa. Inspired by the uprisings in Tunis and Cairo, teenagers sprayed on a wall in their schoolhouse: "You're next, doctor!" That meant Assad, a trained ophthalmologist. On March 6th, several teenagers were handcuffed and severely tortured until they confessed to the crime in the school yard. The security forces are said to have told the parents: “Forget your children. Go home and make more of them. If you can't do it, bring your wives and we'll do it for you."
State violence against the youth drove thousands into the streets in Daraa, and people were soon protesting in many other cities as well. The security forces opened fire repeatedly. By the time Assad gave a speech in parliament on March 30, over a hundred people had already been shot. But the president showed no remorse: “According to the holy Quran, riot is worse than murder. Anyone who participates, with or without intent, is destroying their country," said Assad. “So there can be no compromises. The homeland is at stake, there is a great conspiracy. "
Officer Matar was given leave for the first time three weeks after the revolution began. He used it to find out the truth in his hometown of Homs. In his neighborhood too, people took to the streets every week after Friday prayers. Dressed as a civilian, he mingled with the crowd. He immediately recognized with his own eyes: "Everything I was told in the army was a lie." There were no firearms, no knives, and no terrorists. The violence emanated from the state: "Soldiers at a checkpoint opened fire and killed thirteen people," recalls Matar in an interview in his run-down apartment in Tripoli.
Homs was soon to prove to be the "capital of the revolution". Because its Sunni majority population had long harboured a grudge against Governor Iyad Ghazal, a personal friend of the President. “He wanted to destroy the market in the old town and build it with high residential towers and shopping centers,” says Matar. «But who did the market belong to? The Sunnis. "
The gigantic development project was called "Homs' Dream" and wanted to transform the historic city into a small, faceless Dubai. Shop and landowners have been pressured to sell their property below market value. The construction project was soon popularly dubbed "Homs' nightmare". The governor's goal was not only to earn a lot of money, but also to bring about demographic change, says Matar with conviction. "Alawites would have settled in the new apartments in the city center."
The Alawites are the religious minority in Syria, including Assad. For centuries, the Alawis, who are close to Shiite Islam, have been ostracised and marginalised in the Middle East by the Sunni majority. It is not for nothing that their traditional settlement area is located in the coastal mountains. With the influx of people from the countryside, Alawite districts only emerged in Homs in the past two to three decades.
But with the coup of 1970 by Hafez al-Assad - Bashar's father - the social hierarchies changed. Assad senior was the first non-Sunni president. In order to secure his power, he relied more and more on Alawites in key positions in the military and the secret service. Especially after the armed uprising of the Muslim Brotherhood in the city of Hama in 1982, the Syrian surveillance state took on Orwellian features - with fifteen different secret services. The régime ended the uprising itself with a massacre that killed up to 25,000 people.
"I was discriminated against in the army because I am a Sunni," says Matar. "The Alawites were something better." They would have enjoyed many privileges such as a car, more troops or better opportunities for advancement. “The voice of an Alawite was heard, even if he was of a lower rank than me. My vote didn't count."
Religious resentment, however, was not in the foreground at the beginning of the Syrian revolution. As in the other countries of the Arab Spring, poverty, corruption and lack of freedom drove people onto the streets. Matar remembers the demonstration on April 18, 2011 in the clock tower square in Homs. The whole city was on its feet. "A large group of Alawites also took part."
The organisers had ensured with checkpoints at all entrances to the square that no armed people mingled with the crowd. The speakers on a small stage were not Islamists, but the intellectuals of the city. The protests on Tahrir Square in Cairo were the model, says Matar. Thousands of demonstrators wanted to hold out around the clock tower in Homs until Assad resigned. As in Egypt, they chanted: "The people want the régime to be overthrown."
However, Assad did not consider resigning. The Interior Ministry described the events in Homs as an "armed uprising" by Islamist groups. Terrorism cannot be tolerated. "At 2 a.m., troops came from the market and opened fire," says Matar. According to the human rights organization Human Rights Watch , at least seventeen people were killed.
The violence of the "Alawite régime", which had lasted for weeks, soon led to counter-violence: practically at the same time as the protests in April, the Alawite general Abdu Telawi, his two sons and a nephew were murdered in Homs. The perpetrators mutilated the bodies. The state television reported extensively on the funeral, at which the angry crowd chanted "Only Allah, Syria and Bashar". This was also a turning point for many Alawis in Homs who sympathized with the revolution. "The Alawites are a minority here, the Sunnis want to drive us out," said an Alawite officer from Homs in a study by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. "It's not about Assad's person, but if he goes, the Alawites are in danger."
Right from the start, the secret services mainly mobilized unemployed young people in the Alawite districts of Homs. They sent them to Sunni neighborhoods to demonstrate for the régime. Just because of this, the resentment between the religious groups grew. At the same time, the régime recruited paramilitary thugs and murder squads, the so-called Shabiha, from among the Alawis. In July, three mutilated bodies of Shabiha fighters were found in Homs. Alawis then set fire to Sunni shops and committed revenge killings. Among the victims was a mother of three.
Assad sent tanks to Homs in May. Like many other Sunnis, Matar deserted the military in early summer and joined a unit of the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Their goal was initially only to protect peaceful demonstrators. "If they came under fire, we opened fire too so they could run away." However, since the régime did not give in, the armed opposition soon launched its own attacks. By March 2012, around 60,000 soldiers had deserted from the army.
But not everyone has joined the FSA, says Matar. "Not all could kill." At the latest, however, the Karm el-Zeitoun massacre in March 2012, which he himself witnessed, made killing easy for him. Shabiha drove in three buses to the district of Homs to indiscriminately kill civilians. A whole family with twelve members was slaughtered. "They stabbed a pregnant woman, cut off her stomach and the head of the six-month-old baby." He arrived at the scene shortly afterwards: “When I saw that, I almost lost my mind. It made me mad."
After that he no longer saw any fellow citizens in his enemies. "They are not Syrians. The Alawite régime is an occupying power, an Iranian régime. Had Assad been an honorable man, he would never have let it get that far. If he were a Syrian, he would not have invited the Russians, the Iranians and the Lebanese Hezbollah to kill his own people. If I have a house, who do I leave it to? Strangers or your own children? Your own children, of course."
Without the support of Russian fighter pilots and Iranian militias, the FSA might have defeated the régime. In this way, however, Assad was able to bring the large cities in central Syria back under his control and, through mass displacement, bring about a demographic change that he would hardly have achieved with building projects such as "Homs' Dream". In Homs alone, around a third of the once 800,000 inhabitants were displaced. Few have been able to return so far, and new laws allow Damascus to expropriate refugees with great ease.
However, the armed opposition also bears a responsibility for this tragedy, as Matar admits. "In the beginning, the wealthy businessmen in Homs financed us." But many of these donors have fled abroad while their combat troops have grown larger and larger. "We needed foreign supporters. But their agenda did not always coincide with our goals." States such as Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia also pursued conflicting interests. "There were commanders who put money above the matter and sold themselves to the highest bidder."
Matar may never see his hometown again either. In the winter of 2012, a machine gun bullet hit him in the thigh, and fragments of a nail bomb dug into his stomach and hand. Six months later he came to the Lebanese coastal city of Tripoli. His injuries are still not completely healed: "I need an artificial hip joint." But there is no money for that. The former lieutenant tries to keep himself and his family of five afloat with odd jobs. He offers small goods transports with a pick-up. "I owe $4,000."
Sometimes he received calls from former Alawite service comrades in the army. "We'll find you and kill you," they threatened him. Once he was almost kidnapped by Hezbollah people. Despite his predicament, he still believes in the revolution, in a free and democratic Syria. The tide could turn against Assad again at any time. "If I didn't have this hope, I would have to regret everything." '
'Forcibly displaced Syrians who took refuge in northwestern Syria's Idlib are denouncing the Bashar Assad régime's upcoming presidential elections as "illegitimate," underlining that it is unacceptable for someone who kills his own people and has displaced millions to hold polls in the country.
