Syrian Soldiers Become Video Witnesses
Please click the link for the video. It’s flash so I could not embed.
wired.com
Editor’s note: Some dissident Syrian soldiers ordered to violently suppress pro-democracy protests have been risking their lives to secretly shoot and upload video of the deadly clashes. The author of this article recently met with several soldiers in a Damascus suburb.
Exclusive Video: Syrian Soldiers Buck Regime to Film Violence
By Dwight Holly
May 20, 2011 |
7:35 pm |
Categories: Info War
WARNING: The videos in this report include violently graphic scenes that some viewers may find disturbing.
Editor’s note: Some dissident Syrian soldiers ordered to violently suppress pro-democracy protests have been risking their lives to secretly shoot and upload video of the deadly clashes. The author of this article recently met with several soldiers in a Damascus suburb.
The real identities of all of the people in this story, including the author, have been withheld to prevent reprisals. Similarly, the videos included with this report, some of which the author says were recorded by Syrian soldiers, have been altered by Wired.com to conceal the identities of the people in them.
DAMASCUS, Syria — Osama is 22 years old, green-eyed and short-haired, and loves wearing casual jeans and colored graffiti T-shirts. He is a soldier serving the Syrian army, but sometimes he leaves his uniform at the military base and bribes his chief officer, to take a day off.
The real identities of all of the people in this story, including the author, have been withheld to prevent reprisals. Similarly, the videos included with this report, some of which the author says were recorded by Syrian soldiers, have been altered by Wired.com to conceal the identities of the people in them.
Wired.com acknowledges the assistance of Meedan, a community for Arabic-English dialogue and translated current affairs, in reporting this story.
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DAMASCUS, Syria — Osama is 22 years old, green-eyed and short-haired, and loves wearing casual jeans and colored graffiti T-shirts. He is a soldier serving the Syrian army, but sometimes he leaves his uniform at the military base and bribes his chief officer, to take a day off.
He recently traveled here to go hunting for a brand-new video-equipped smartphone in Bahtha, the tech district of the Syrian capital where you can find every sort of electronics at a bargain price.
“They told me that Israel had occupied Daraa, and some people there were siding with Zionism against our president, so we had to go and liberate the city,” he says. But “there was no Israeli occupation there. We were actually occupying the city, there was nobody else”.