The teen had fallen to the ground, but Assad’s military security forces continued to shoot: first they kicked him and clubbed him with sticks and then they ended by firing one more shot into his side. “Make sure he is dead,” was the order given by the commander of the Military Security Forces, in the account given of the incident before the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an NGO with a London base that has access to a large number of voluntary informers who life in Syria.
Mohammed Abdul Salam Al Mlaessa was only 14 years old. How he was beaten and brought to such pitiful condition at the end of this brutal execution can be seen in the videos on You Tube (it is not possible to verify the authenticity, Western journalists are forbidden to report by the regime): a bullet hole in the left side, his face plummeted and in a pool of blood. An “exemplary” lesson for the other youth present.
That Damascus is afraid of students was something that was clear from the start: at the beginning of the protests, last March, repression against a group of youth that had made anti-Assad graffiti on the walls of their school. “From primary school to high school, the youth of Syria are in the front line in the protests,” Mousab Azzawi, from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights states. “No regime can resist when students protest and for this reason, they fear them, they kill them, they take them as hostages. And they make their families hear their voice over the phone as they are torturing them.”
The funeral of Mohammed was attended by at least 45 thousand people, according to estimates. “To disperse the crowd, agents used electrical sticks that provoked temporary paralysis,” Azzawi states. At the ceremony there was an evening sit-in with 8 thousand youths in what has been renamed “Liberty Square”. The gathering was dispersed by firing from the security forces: here there were two of the day’s thirty victims, the majority of which in the city of Homs, the capital of the protesters, where the deserters have taken refuge. But also in the streets of Hama, Deraa, Idleb, people continue to be killed. The activists report that yesterday forty protesters had been killed by soldiers near the Jordan border.
The repression has not stopped, despite the agreement made by Damascus on 2 November to follow the Arab League’s peace plan which calls for the end of the violence and the withdrawal of the tanks from the cities. And after the assaults on the Embassies of the Arab countries that had announced the suspension of Syria from the pan-Arab organisation, the regime has used the iron fist to fill the squares with pro-Assad marches and demonstrations. The case of Mohammed is not an isolated one. Similar incidents have been reported in other parts of the country. Azzawi states: “This same Sunday at Hama, the security forces shot against a group of students who had refused to participate in a loyalist march: five of them never again opened their eyes.”
Here are the videos -
