‘We
were living in security and peace. These areas are being targeted,
they want to force us to leave. Every Syrian is being targeted,’
one Syrian religious leader told a delegation of reporters who
visited Aleppo earlier this month.
by
Eva Bartlett
Part
3 - The FSA’s underground prison in al-Layramoun
We walked
through the ornately-carved entrance of a building in the
al-Layramoun industrial district that once housed a dye factory. More
recently, though, it’s been used as a base by the 16th Division of
the Free Syrian Army. In an interior room, I noticed a 4G mobile
phone card from Turkcell, Turkey’s leading mobile phone operator.
In
neighboring buildings we saw bags of materials reportedly used to
make the gas canister and water heater explosives known colloquially
as Hell 1 and Hell 2, the latter of which can inflict significantly
more damage, including leveling entire floors of houses. There were
also metal fragments, which are added to explosives to inflict
maximum damage. Another room contained a pile of shavings which one
of the Syrian soldiers accompanying us said was used to compress
explosives in the gas canister bombs which the Free Syrian Army and
other terrorist groups fire upon neighborhoods in greater Aleppo.
When we
approached the Nusra Front-occupied road leading toward Daher Abed
Rabbo, SAA soldiers advised us to run, not walk.
Just beyond
that road, bunkered three stories below ground, the Free Syrian
Army’s nightmarish improvised prison for SAA captives was untouched
by the bombs inflicting damage above-ground. These attacks target
terrorists who fire on the civilians of Aleppo and retreat
underground.
Al-Layramoun
and Bani Zaid are home to the same landscape of battered buildings
that one finds in areas where militants have bunkered deeply down.
Seeing the destruction, some of the other journalists in our
delegation mention only the physical damage to the buildings.
“Buildings lay pancaked by airstrikes,” one wrote,
pointing an incriminating finger at the Syrian government without
giving any context as to why these areas were hammered.
The real
shame is not actually the physical destruction of buildings, but the
incursion into these districts by Western-backed terrorists,
including the Free Syrian Army, the Nusra Front, and Da’esh, among
others. Nearly six years into the needless bloodshed, their criminal
and savage acts against Syrian civilians and soldiers are
well-documented. And it’s common knowledge that they bunker down to
avoid airstrikes.
The Free
Syrian Army’s nine suffocating, improvised metal solitary
confinement cells and three rooms used as regular cells in the
underground prison bunker in al-Layramoun were all intact despite the
aerial bombings. Buildings are devastated above-ground because of the
presence of militants deep underground, where airstrikes inflict
considerably less damage.
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