Syrian Security Forces Kill Relatives of Defector Military Officer
Syrian Defector
Syrian president’s security forces killed two relatives of a defector officer prompting the activists to ask Russian leaders to abandon their support for Bashar al-Assad and determine him to stop the violent crackdown on protestors. The security forces killed on Friday in the province of Idlib a child and a brother of colonel Hussein Harmoush, the highest military ranked officer to switch sides and leave al-Assad’s army.
Three other people were killed during the protest on Friday, and at least 11 were wounded in the suburbs of the capital, where residents fired weapons.
On Thursday, the Syrian authorities have been reported chasing the former governor of Hama province, Mohammed Adnan al-Bakhour, who switched sides, confessing he did that because the regime had forced him to falsify documents so that the deaths of the people killed by the governmental troops be said to have been killed by the “thugs” the regime blames the turmoil in the country on.
According to the former attorney general, there are thousands of Syrians arrested and tortured, some of them dying of the injuries.
Al-Bakhour said that there are hundreds of Syrian people who were killed in the prisons and were buried in mass graves. He estimated that there are some 10,000 people arrested.
It is estimated that some 700 soldiers have already defected from the army al-Assad is sending against the civilian population. The number seems small and the rank of the soldiers too low to make it possible that the situation be reversed by a military coup.
Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said that his country was opened for a variety of approaches on the Syrian situation but warned that a military attack would throw the entire Middle East into chaos.
Russia has its only military facility in the Middle East on Syrian territory, and is an old ally of this country since the Soviet era. Medvedev said that Russia rejects the demand made by US president Barack Obama and the Arab League for Bashar al-Assad to step down.
