“They Have Assassinated Syria”

Zaher Sahloul bears witness to the atrocities of Assad’s snipers and tells an upsetting tale:

Almost every doctor I met at the hospital told me another horrific story about a young mother who tried to make the crossing with her two children.

When she hastened through the corridor, holding one child in each hand, a sniper targeted her 4-year-old son, killing him instantly. She started screaming in agony. Then a bullet hit her second son, a 3 year-old, and killed him, too. She sat down between the bodies of her sons, waiting for the sniper to shoot her… but the shot did not come. He spared her to live a life without her children, to be consumed by a gnawing emptiness — something snipers have done to countless Syrian mothers. When she finally arrived at M-1 with the dead bodies of her two sons, she was in the middle of a complete mental breakdown.

The snipers, and the regime that deploys them, have succeeded in transforming a peaceful movement for democratic revolution into a civil war, planting fear and deep psychological scars, displacing tens of thousands of civilians fleeing for safety, creating hatred among different ethnic and religious groups, fuelling sectarianism, and attracting extremism. Their bullets have not only killed my compatriots, but also my homeland.