Aisha Shahada and her husband come to the wall every day, sometimes on their way to or from the shops, sometimes with the sole purpose of seeing their dead son's face, a report in the British daily Guardian wrote.

Ahmed Mustafa Karim, Aisha's son, was 21 when he was killed in his home town of Aleppo on 14 October last year. His parents had fled the city several months earlier when rebel forces stormed in. "He had been in the army for a year and a quarter when he died. We never saw him after he was conscripted. He went off saying 'You will not see my face again unless we win or I die,'" says Aisha.

His poster is on the third of six rows of pictures, just low enough for his mother to go up on tiptoes and kiss his face. I counted at least 60 in each row, bringing the total to around 400.

"We pray for Bashar. He's better than all other Arab League leaders put together," says Aisha, who is confident that Syria's war would end if only Qatar and Turkey stopped allowing the rebels a safe haven as well as supplying arms and foreign fighters across the border.

"I pray those two countries one day go through the same kind of war. Then they will realize what we are going through."

The 400 faces on Tartous' Martyrs' Wall are only a fraction of the human losses that the country has suffered against militants many of them extremists who have created most brutal scenes a war could see.

Syria has been gripped by a deadly unrest led by hundreds of al-Qaeda-linked and extremist groups, funded and supported by foreign countries, which has taken thousands of lives, so many of them brutally tortured and killed in brutal ways.

There are many videos and pictures uploaded over the internet by militants showing how they “punish” Syrian soldiers who were unlucky to fall in their hands, for defending their country.

A recent raw video of rebels in Syria executing Syrian soldiers was so grisly, and so barbaric, that the New York Times staffers who watched and edited it for online publication were made “physically ill”.

SHI/SHI