More than 80 people have been killed in the attack that started last week, as al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front extremists attacked Adra and massacred people family by family.
"The decapitators" is how the Adra residents, who managed to flee the violence there, call the extremist attackers who have the town under their control now, the Russia Today wrote in a report.
Adra, a town with a population of 20,000, was captured by extremist militants from the Al-Nusra and the Liwa al-Islam last week, following fierce fighting with country’s army forces. The town’s seizure was accompanied by mass executions of civilians.
RT Arabic has managed to speak to some of the eyewitnesses of the atrocities.
Most of them have fled the town, leaving their relatives and friends behind, so they asked not to be identified in the report for security reasons.
An Adra resident said he escaped from the town “under a storm of bullets.” He later contacted his colleagues, who described how the executions of civilians were carried out by the militants.
“They had lists of government employees on them,” the man told RT. “This means they had planned for it beforehand and knew who works in the governmental agencies. They went to the addresses they had on their list, forced the people out and subjected them to the so-called “Sharia trials.” I think that’s what they call it. They sentenced them to death by beheading.”
A woman, hiding her face from the camera, told RT of the beheadings she had seen.
“There was slaughter everywhere,” she said. “The eldest was only 20 years old; he was slaughtered. They were all children. I saw them with my own eyes. They killed fourteen people with a machete. I don’t know if these people were Alawites. I don’t know why they were slaughtered. They grabbed them by their heads and slaughtered them like sheep.”
It’s been reported that 80 civilians were killed in the massacre. The death toll could still grow, as currently the information coming from Adra is scarce. The town has been surrounded and isolated by the Syrian army that has been trying to force the extremists out.
“Civilians told us that the workers of an Adra bakery were all executed and burned during the first hours of the attack. Whole families were massacred. We do not have an exact estimation of the number because we are unable to get into the town, but the number is high,” Kinda Shimat, Syria’s Social Affairs Minister, told RT.
Details of the executions are trickling out of the town as eyewitnesses tell their stories.
“They killed everyone at the Adra Ummalia police station,” another fugitive from the town told RT.
“And they killed everyone at the Adra Ummalia hospital where my sister works. She stayed alive only because she didn’t show up for work that day. There are about 200 people at the police station. They are civilians. The militants are hiding among them, using them as a shield to prevent the Army from bombing the police.”
The events in Adra are a further example of the shift that has taken place within the Syrian rebel forces which has lately been dominated by extremists, according to Michel Chossudovsky, director of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
The war in Syria started in March 2011, when pro-reform protests turned into a massive insurgency following the intervention of Western and regional states.
The unrest, which took in terrorist groups from across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, has transpired as one of the bloodiest conflicts in recent history.
According to the United Nations, more than 120,000 people have been killed and millions displaced due to the turmoil that has gripped Syria for over two years.
SHI/SHI