Siege of Hama (2011) | |
---|---|
Part of the Syrian revolution | |
![]() | |
Location | |
Target | Opposition protesters |
Date | 3 July [1] [2] – 4 August 2011 [3] (1 month and 1 day) |
Executed by | ![]() |
Outcome | Protests suppressed |
Casualties | 16 civilians killed in early July 2011 [1] 200 civilians killed during Ramadan offensive [3] Total: 216+ killed |
The 2011 siege of Hama was among the many nationwide crackdowns by the Syrian government during the Syrian revolution, the early stage of the Syrian civil war. Anti-government protests had been ongoing in the Syrian city of Hama since 15 March 2011, when large protests were first reported in the city, [4] similar to the protests elsewhere in Syria. The events beginning in July 2011 were described by anti-government activists in the city as a "siege" [5] or "blockade". [6]
On 1 July, with more than 400,000 protestors, Hama witnessed the largest demonstration against President Bashar al-Assad. [2] Two days later, government tanks were deployed at Hama, [7] in an operation that led to more than 16 civilian deaths at the hands of Syrian security forces. [1]
On 31 July, the Syrian government deployed the Syrian Army into Hama to control protests on the eve of Ramadan, as part of a nationwide crackdown, nicknamed the "Ramadan Massacre." [8] At least 142 people across Syria died on that day, including over 100 in Hama alone, and 29 in Deir ez-Zor. Hundreds more were wounded. [9] [10] By 4 August, more than 200 civilians had been killed in Hama. [3]
Historically, Hama had been the epicenter of anti-Ba'athist government since the 1963 Ba'athist coup. As early as 1964, a wide scale riot—often described as an uprising—broke out in the city and was violently suppressed by the military, resulting in more than 70 citizens killed. Violence occurred once again during the 1976–1982 Islamic uprising in Syria, when hundreds of Hama citizens were executed in the April 1981 crackdown. In February 1982, a much larger scale massacre took place in Hama following an armed and organized uprising of Islamic groups occurred, centered in the city. The 1982 massacre claimed the lives of some 10,000 - 25,000 Hama citizens and Islamic militants and as many as 1,000 Syrian Army personnel.
On 3 June 2011, major demonstrations in Hama began, primarily in the city center, and on occasion in the suburbs. Syrian security forces, including military and police, shot dead up to 25 people when they dispersed a demonstration by tens of thousands of locals. [11]
On 1 July 2011, with more than 400,000 protestors, Hama witnessed the largest demonstration against Bashar al-Assad. [2] Soon after, Assad sacked Hama's governor. [12] Two days after, Syrian tanks deployed at Hama [7] in an operation that led to more than 20 civilians being killed by the Syrian security forces and two rape cases were witnessed. [1]
As Hama became a stronghold for opposition to the embattled government of President Bashar al-Assad, reports of violence also grew. An armed blockade was imposed on the city on 3 July. [2]
On 6–7 July, while touring some of Syria's conflict zones, the United States ambassador to Syria Robert Ford, visited Hama and declared that he would stay until Friday, to the ire of the Syrian government, which perceived the unauthorized trip as proof of the US inciting violence to "destabilize" the country. [13] [14] JJ Harder, the press attaché of the US embassy in Damascus, later told Al Jazeera: "Our ambassador Robert Ford was in Hama earlier this month, and he saw with his own eyes the violence that they are talking about. There was none. He maybe saw one teenager with a stick at a checkpoint, and the government is going on with these absolute fabrications about armed gangs running the streets of Hama and elsewhere. Hama has shown itself to be a model of peaceful protest. That was why our ambassador chose to go there." [15] The French ambassador to Syria, Éric Chevallier, subsequently joined the US ambassador to express his support to the victims, in what Robert Ford claimed to be "a gesture of solidarity with local protesters". [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [13]
On 8 July, more than 500,000 Syrians flooded through the city of Hama in what activists claim was the single biggest protest yet against the Assad government. [21] More tanks were deployed around the outskirts of Hama as part of a strengthening blockade following the protests. [20] It is estimated that up to 350,000 of the city's 700,000 population took part in the protests [22]
On 29 July, over 500,000 citizens rallied in the city following Muslim prayers in which a pro-rebel cleric told the congregation "the regime must go". [23] Local support for the government had imploded by 30 July in Homs, Deir ez-Zor and Hama. [23] [24] [25] President Assad reportedly sent "Terror Buses" packed with shabiha private Alawite militia and party loyalists into Hama. [26] On the eve of Ramadan, Syria witnessed the bloodiest day in the 139-day uprising. [24]
On 31 July, Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), said that Syrian security forces launched an offensive at 5:00 am (0200 GMT) on Muadhamiya, north of Hama, then encircled Hama shortly afterwards. [27] In a separate incident on the same day, political prisoners attempted to mutiny in Hama's central prison, to which security forces responded with live ammunition. The immediate death toll of the failed mutiny was not immediately known. [28] The state news agency reported that eight policemen were killed in clashes in Hama. [29]
The government blamed much of the violence on terrorists and militants, which it accused of killing hundreds of security personnel. [30] At least 136 fatalities were confirmed, with over 100 in Hama and 19 in Deir ez-Zor, in addition to hundreds of injuries. The crackdown was the most intense of the Syrian revolution thus far, with over 2,200 protesters dead. [9] [15] [31] One Hama resident, a doctor who did not want to be identified for fear of arrest, told Reuters that Syrian Army tanks were attacking Hama from four different directions and "firing randomly". Another resident said snipers had climbed onto the roofs of the state-owned electricity company and the main prison, and that electricity had been cut in eastern neighbourhoods. [15] Tanks also reportedly fired on mosques while loudspeakers broadcast "Allahu Akbar". [32]
The United Nations Security Council met on the night of 31 July to debate the situation in Syria. [25]
Syrian dissidents claimed that the tank assault on Hama on 31 July, in which 84 people had died, was an attempt to pacify and regain control of the city ahead of Ramadan and to avert protests during the holy month. [33]
Syrian security forces continued to bombard Hama on 1 August. The British Daily Telegraph reported that "many of Hama's residents ... braved the obvious danger to head to mosques for dawn prayers. As they emerged onto the streets, the shelling resumed. Three worshipers were struck down and killed, while a fourth was shot dead by a sniper as he got into his car, opposition activists said. Tank shells struck residential buildings in the suburbs of al-Qousour and al-Hamidiya." According to one resident, "The tanks are firing at random. They don't care who they hit. The aim seems to be to kill and terrify as many people as possible."' [25] "The number of those wounded is huge and hospitals cannot cope, particularly because we lack the adequate equipment," said a Hama hospital worker, Dr Abdel Rahman. [23] [24] The death toll in Hama and Homs was reportedly 'slightly enlarged' according to the local governorate's sources. [34] Government tanks also moved in on the eastern town of Abu Kamal and in the nearby city of Deir al-Zour, upwards of 29 tanks were witnessed over that weekend. [24]
Activists and witnesses said at least 24 civilians were killed in attacks on several cities, including Hama, on 1 August. [30] Later that day, the European Union imposed travel bans on five more military and government officials and extended sanctions against Assad's government, including Syrian Defence Minister Ali Habib Mahmud. [25] [30]
The UN Security Council met to discuss the situation in Syria on 2 August. The US, US, and France wanted to formally condemn Syria, but Russia and China were afraid that "it could be used as a pretext for military intervention in Syria". [35] [36] The same day, Syrian dissident Radwan Ziadeh asked US president Barack Obama and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to demand President Assad step down. [37]
By the morning of 3 August, Hama was under nearly continuous gunfire since the early hours of the morning and by midday, Syrian Army tanks stormed through rebel barricades in the city, occupying a central square. A post on the "Syrian Revolution" Facebook page read "The army is now stationed in Assi Square," and "The heroic youths of Hama are confronting them and banning them from entering neighborhoods." [38] By this time, water, electricity and all communications in Hama and its surrounding villages and towns had been cut off, according to nearby online posts on social networking sites. [38] The accounts could not be independently confirmed because the Syrian government banned foreign journalists from entering the country to report. [38] Shaam, an online video channel that was aligned with the protest movement, posted a video dated 3 August that showed at least one tank attacking a neighbourhood that the narrator said was Hayy al-Hader in Hama; heavy plumes of smoke could be seen rising in the sky. [38] Following the tank attacks, workers in Hama declared three days of general strike in memory of those killed by security forces. [39]
Hama's Local Coordination Committee had e-mailed a statement saying that shelling was especially concentrated in the Janoub al-Mala'ab and Manakh districts. The group also claimed in the e-mail that civilians were being shot and houses shelled. [38] Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the SOHR, warned that "We might be witnessing another massacre in Hama." [38]
The Russian foreign ministry's Middle East and North Africa Department chief, Sergei Vershinin, reminded the UN that his country was not "categorically" against adopting a UN resolution condemning the violence in Syria, but the Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister, Faisal Mekdad urged India to ignore Western "propaganda" if there was a vote over it in the Security Council. [40]
A total of 200 people were killed in Hama by 4 August. [3]
The Attorney General of the Hama Governorate announced his resignation on 1 September 2011 in response to the Assad government's crackdown on protests. The government claimed he had been kidnapped and forced to lie at gunpoint. [41]
On 28 February 2012, government forces shelled a town in Hama Province, Helfaya, killing 20 civilian villagers. Activists said the 20 deaths of Sunni Muslim villagers there were among at least 100 killed in the province in the last two weeks in revenge for rebel Free Syrian Army attacks on security forces commanded by members of Assad's minority Alawite sect. [42]
Bashar al-Assad is a Syrian politician who is the current and 19th president of Syria since 17 July 2000. In addition, he is the commander-in-chief of the Syrian Armed Forces and the secretary-general of the Central Command of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, which nominally espouses a neo-Ba'athist ideology. His father and predecessor was General Hafiz al-Assad, whose presidency in 1971–2000 marked the transfiguration of Syria from a republican state into a de facto dynastic dictatorship, tightly controlled by an Alawite-dominated elite composed of the armed forces and the Mukhabarat, who are loyal to the al-Assad family.
The Hama massacre occurred in February 1982 when the Syrian Arab Army and the Defense Companies, under orders of president Hafez al-Assad, besieged the town of Hama for 27 days in order to quell an uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood against the Ba'athist government. The campaign that had begun in 1976 by Sunni Muslim groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood, was brutally crushed in an anti-Sunni massacre at Hama, carried out by the Syrian Arab Army and Alawite militias under commanding General Rifaat al-Assad.
Terrorism in Syria has a long history dating from the state-terrorism deployed by the Ba'athist government since its seizure of power through a violent coup in 1963. The Ba'athist government have since deployed various types of state terrorism; such as ethnic cleansing, forced deportations, massacres, summary executions, mass rapes and other forms of violence to maintain its totalitarian rule in Syria. The most extensive use of state terrorism in the 20th century was, the state deployed extensive violence against civilians, such as the case of 2004 Qamishli massacre. When Arab Spring spread to Syria in 2011, the Ba'athist security apparatus launched a brutal crackdown against peaceful protestors calling for freedom and dignity, which killed thousands of civilians and deteriorated the crisis into a full-scale civil war. Taking advantage of the situation, transnational Jihadist groups like Islamic State and al-Nusra began to emerge in Syria as the war escalated, some of which emulated the deadly terrorist tactics of the Assad regime.
The following is a timeline of the Syrian Civil War from May to August 2011, including the escalation of violence in many Syrian cities.
International reactions to the Syrian civil war ranged from support for the government to calls for the government to dissolve. The Arab League, United Nations and Western governments in 2011 quickly condemned the Syrian government's response to the protests which later evolved into the Syrian civil war as overly heavy-handed and violent. Many Middle Eastern governments initially expressed support for the government and its "security measures", but as the death toll mounted, especially in Hama, they switched to a more balanced approach, criticizing violence from both government and protesters. Russia and China vetoed two attempts at United Nations Security Council sanctions against the Syrian government.
Shabiha is a colloquial and generally derogatory term for various loosely-organised Syrian militias loyal to Assad family, used particularly during the initial phase of the Syrian Civil War. As the war has evolved, many groups which had previously been considered shabiha were amalgamated into the National Defence Force and other paramilitary groups.
Protests began in Syria as early as 26 January 2011, and erupted on 15 March 2011 with a "Day of Rage" protest generally considered to mark the start of a nationwide uprising. The Syrian government's reaction to the protests became violent on 16 March, and deadly on 18 March, when four unarmed protesters were killed in Daraa.
The following is a timeline of the Syrian uprising from September to December 2011. This period saw the uprising take on many of the characteristics of a civil war, according to several outside observers, including the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, as armed elements became better organized and began carrying out successful attacks in retaliation for the ongoing crackdown by the Syrian government on demonstrators and defectors.
The Rif Dimashq clashes were a series of unrests and armed clashes in and around Damascus, the capital of Syria, from November 2011 until a stalemate in March 2012. The violence was part of the wider early insurgency phase of the Syrian civil war. Large pro-government and anti-government protests took place in the suburbs and center of Damascus, with the situation escalating when members of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) started attacking military targets in November.
The September 2011 – March 2012 Idlib Governorate clashes were the violent incidents that took place in Idlib Governorate, a province of Syria, from September 2011 and prior to the April 2012 Idlib Governorate Operation.
The following is a timeline of the Syrian Civil War from January to April 2012, during which time the spate of protests that began in January 2011 lasted into another calendar year. An Arab League monitoring mission ended in failure as Syrian troops and anti-government militants continued to do battle across the country and the Syrian government prevented foreign observers from touring active battlefields, including besieged opposition strongholds. A United Nations-backed ceasefire brokered by special envoy Kofi Annan met a similar fate, with unarmed UN peacekeepers' movements tightly controlled by the government and fighting.
On 6 January 2012, a bomb exploded in the Al-Midan district of Damascus, Syria. According to the Syrian government, a suicide bomber attacked buses carrying riot police shortly before an anti-government protest was to begin. It said that 26 people were killed and over 60 were injured. Most of the victims were civilians, though the Syrian government showed footage of what it claimed to be the funeral of 11 police officers killed in the attack.
The Hama Governorate clashes were a series of incidents of fighting during late 2011 and early 2012 in the Syrian Governorate of Hama, as part of the Early insurgency phase of the Syrian Civil War.
The following is a timeline of the Syrian Civil War from May to August 2012. The majority of death tolls reported for each day comes from the Local Coordination Committees, an opposition activist group based in Syria, and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, another opposition group based in London.
The Houla massacre was a mass murder of civilians by Syrian government forces that took place on May 25, 2012, in the midst of the Syrian Civil War, in the town of Taldou, in the Houla Region of Syria, a string of towns northwest of Homs. According to the United Nations, 108 people were killed, including 34 women and 49 children. While a small proportion of the deaths appeared to have resulted from artillery and tank rounds used against Taldou, the U.N. later announced that most of the massacre's victims had been "summarily executed in two separate incidents". UN investigators have reported that some witnesses and survivors stated that the massacre was committed by pro-government Shabiha. In August 2012 UN investigators released a report which stated that it was likely that Syrian troops and Shabiha militia were responsible for the massacre, concluding that: "On the basis of available evidence, the commission has a reasonable basis to believe that the perpetrators of the deliberate killing of civilians, at both the Abdulrazzak and Al-Sayed family locations, were aligned to the Government. It rests this conclusion on its understanding of access to the crime sites, the loyalties of the victims, the security layout in the area including the position of the government’s water authority checkpoint and the consistent testimonies of victims and witnesses with direct knowledge of the events. This conclusion is bolstered by the lack of credible information supporting other possibilities."
The Al-Qubeir massacre, also known as the Hama massacre, occurred in the small village of Al-Qubeir near Hama, Syria, on 6 June 2012 during the country's ongoing civil conflict. Al-Qubeir is described as a Sunni farming settlement surrounded by Alawite villages in the central province of Hama. According to preliminary evidence, troops had surrounded the village which was followed by pro-government Shabiha militia entering the village and killing civilians with "barbarity," UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the UN Security Council.
The Battle of Tremseh was a military confrontation between the Syrian Army and the Free Syrian Army in Tremseh, Syria, in the late hours of 12 July 2012 during the Syrian Civil War leading to the reported death of dozens of rebels, and an unknown number of civilians. On 14 July 2012, the UN observer mission issued a statement, based on the investigation by its team that went to the town, that the Syrian military mainly targeted the homes of rebels and activists, in what the BBC said was a contradiction of the initial opposition claims of a civilian massacre. They said that the number of casualties was unclear and added that they intend to return to the town to continue their investigation.
The siege of Daraa occurred within the context of the 2011 Arab Spring protests in Syria, in which Daraa was the center of unrest. On 25 April 2011, the Syrian Army began a ten-day siege of the city, an operation that helped escalate the uprising into an armed rebellion and subsequent civil war.
The Syrian revolution, also known as the Syrian Revolution of Dignity, was a series of mass protests and uprisings in Syria – with a subsequent violent reaction by the Syrian Arab Republic – lasting from March 2011 to June 2012, as part of the wider Arab Spring in the Arab world. The revolution, which demanded the end of the decades-long Assad family rule, began as minor demonstrations during January 2011 and transformed into large nation-wide protests in March. The uprising was marked by mass protests against the Ba'athist dictatorship of president Bashar al-Assad meeting police and military violence, massive arrests and a brutal crackdown, resulting in thousands of deaths and tens of thousands wounded.
The early insurgency phase of the Syrian civil war lasted from late July 2011 to April 2012, and was associated with the rise of armed oppositional militias across Syria and the beginning of armed rebellion against the authorities of the Syrian Arab Republic. Though armed insurrection incidents began as early as June 2011 when rebels killed 120–140 Syrian security personnel, the beginning of organized insurgency is typically marked by the formation of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) on 29 July 2011, when a group of defected officers declared the establishment of the first organized oppositional military force. Composed of defected Syrian Armed Forces personnel, the rebel army aimed to remove Bashar al-Assad and his government from power.
{{cite news}}
: Check |url=
value (help){{cite web}}
: |author=
has generic name (help)CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)