[Translator's introduction: Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi]:
So much has occurred during the ten years of unrest and war in Syria, but some events stick out in my memories of the past decade. One of those events is the Qalb Lawza massacre that occurred in June 2015. While the main perpetrators of the massacre were assassinated last year in U.S. drone strikes, the memory of the massacre still remains in the minds of the village's original inhabitants who remain. In this guest post for my site, a resident of Qalb Lawza who still lives in the village recounts the events of the massacre and his feelings about it.
The black masked wolves
Humanitarianism has no borders. It is distinguished in your love for the other whatever that person's place of origin, race, colour and belief. But oppression still has a nest in the hearts of a transgressive group whose hearts are like a boulder rock, not knowing mercy.
On date 10 June 2015 CE, a masked group came to the village of Qalb Lawza that is affiliated with Idlib province in Syria in order to seize the house of one of the people working in the Syrian army and none of his relatives opposed them and the evil of their intentions was apparent in their looks and conduct, which led to a quarrel in which they used weapons and two brothers from the people of the village who had been stripped of their weapons were killed, and a masked man was killed as a result of the mistake of his companion. And the village, whose inhabitants reach 1800 in number, was assaulted by more than 2200 masked men after a circular issued by their leader al-Tunisi Abd al-Salam Sharif from Bizete in Tunisia.
And as a result of the attack 23 people from the sons of the village were killed, among them children, and the people of the village had no knowledge of what evil the masked men would bring upon them, and the state of the village before the terrible massacre was like the state of the inhabitants of the town of Hiroshima before the fall of the atomic bomb.
Also they gathered the youth of the village and its men in one place to execute them en masse, but they failed in their attempt because of a humanitarian intervention from some of the states that love peace and good.
And as a result of that half of the inhabitants of the village left for Damascus and their place was taken by masked foreigners and they came to inhabit their dwellings and seized their property.
That day was a black one upon a beautiful gentle village on the summit of Jabal al-Summaq among the green olive trees that the black wolves turned into blackness that has taken root in the hearts of its people that the days over the course of the years have not been able to remove.