Syrians are peace-loving, hospitable, mild-mannered and generous people, or so our parents and school teachers led us to believe.
This video tells a very different story (please be aware that it contains bloody and distressing scenes). It makes you feel ashamed of your own identity, history, flag, passport, constitution and everything that the country stands for.
It makes you question the very foundations of the Syrian state. Were the French right to divide us up from the very beginning into ungovernable savage mountain people, ignorant farmers and sly and greedy city dwellers? (See 1920s map).
This uprising has brought out the worst and the best in people but it is still very hard to accept that some Syrians can be so barbaric and cruel. This is precisely what the regime wants us to think and fear. It wants to remind us of our supposed ugly past and regional and ethnic hatreds and to demonstrate, “by example”, how we would behave towards each other if it collapsed.
Just remember the faces and accents of the militias in this video, which was taken by one of their own gang members in Daraa. Thankfully it is just a minority but no one should ever be allowed to get away with such ugly crimes against humanity.
