Soldier Says Syrian Atrocities Forced Him to Defect
Ammar Cheikh Omar recalled the first time he was ordered to shoot into a crowd of protesters in Syria. He aimed his AK-47 just above their heads, prayed to God not to make him a killer and pulled the trigger.
Mr. Omar, 29, the soft-spoken and wiry son of Syrian parents who immigrated to Germany in the 1950s, grew up in Rheda-Wiedenbrück, a prosperous village of half-timbered 16th-century houses, where he listened to Mariah Carey and daydreamed about one day returning to Syria.
Today, he is still trying to make sense of his unlikely transformation from a dutiful German student to a killer for the brutal Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad and, ultimately, a defector. “I was proud to be Syrian, but instead became a soldier for a regime that was intent on killing its own people,” Mr. Omar said on a recent day, chain-smoking at a cafe in this Turkish border town. “I thank God every day that I am still alive.”
Human rights groups and Syrian activists said he was one of thousands of Syrians who had inadvertently found themselves deployed as foot soldiers for a government that the United Nations estimates has killed more than 5,000 people since the crackdown on demonstrators began in March.
Soldiers are typically conscripted at age 18, with members of Syria’s Sunni majority making up the bulk of the army ranks and minority Alawites, who come from the same religious group as Mr. Assad, often serving as high-ranking officers or in the state security apparatus. Mr. Omar, a highly educated Sunni with flawless Arabic, gained entry to a security unit attached to the Interior Ministry.
Human rights groups estimate that there are at least 5,000 defectors; an exact number is difficult to confirm because many remain in hiding. “Mr. Omar’s harrowing tale fits an all-too-familiar pattern in which soldiers are deployed away from their hometowns to help ensure that they will be less likely to refuse an order to kill,” said Ole Solvang, a researcher at Human Rights Watch who has interviewed dozens of Syrian defectors, including Mr. Omar. “He was one of the lucky ones, as he managed to escape.”
There is no way to corroborate much of Mr. Omar’s account of his journey to becoming an enforcer for the Assad government. Though human rights groups and activists operating in Syria say it fits the pattern of hundreds of defectors who have fled the country, it is simply one man’s tale. It began in 2004 when he left Germany for Aleppo, in Syria’s north, with the aim of getting in touch with his roots, studying law, improving his Arabic and finding a wife.
He managed to do all that, entering law school, marrying a doctor and, eventually, having a child. His parents, meanwhile, had moved back to Aleppo because his father wanted to live out his final years in the old country.