Red Crescent official killed in Syria
A Red Crescent official and a priest were among the two dozen reported killed Wednesday in Syria, where a pro-government militia stormed neighborhoods in a city already notorious for an earlier revolt.
Abdulrazak Jabero Hisham, the head of the Syrian Red Crescent’s branch in Idlib province, was shot dead by a “terrorist group,” the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency said. The report said he was shot in the head.
Hisham Hassan of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, Switzerland, didn’t have details about the killing, but he said the man was shot on the road between Damascus and Idlib.
And in the flashpoint city of Hama, security forces and pro-government militias assaulted neighborhoods overnight, an opposition activist group reported Wednesday. Among the dead was a priest who was killed while trying to give first aid to a wounded man, according to the Local Coordination Committees of Syria, an umbrella group.
The LCC identified the priest as Basilious Nassar, of the nearby town of Kafr Buhum. He died as militia members pushed into various neighborhoods in Hama, a bastion of Syria’s anti-regime sentiment, according to the LCC.
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The forces bombed the Bab Qebli area “from all directions” and destroyed several buildings, the group said. Several deaths and injuries were reported, according to the group, and the constant shelling made it impossible to rescue the wounded in the western city. Soldiers also launched mortar shells in several neighborhoods, including those of al-Hamidiya, al-Faraya, Jarjameh and Alalillat. Explosions and gunfire rang across the city, and soldiers fired rocket-propelled grenades and nail bombs at houses, the LCC said.
Hama is the site of the notorious 1982 crackdown by the government of Hafez al-Assad, the father of President Bashar al-Assad, and “tens of thousands” of people died at the time, the group said. Another 953 Syrians have been killed in Hama since the current unrest started last March, “including 21 women, 53 little boys, 16 little girls, and 33 that were martyred under torture.