Free Syrian Army fighters and civilians clear rubble from a residential home destroyed by the two missiles Photo: ADAM DEAN

August 6, 2012


Aleppo,:Sakhour Building bombing by Assad's army led to the death of an entire family. Aug 6, 2012



Aleppo: Two Entire Families were Martyred Due to Destruction of a 3 Floor Building in Sakhour



Massacre in Khaldieh Neighborhood, Aleppo



The Daily Telegraph's Richard Spencer was just yards from the scene of the latest tragedy in Syria after missiles fired by Bashar al-Assad's air force wiped out 11 women and children.

Hundreds of thousands of civilians, the UN says, have fled Aleppo in the last two weeks. Not enough.

The Kayali and Katab families stayed and thought they would be safe if they sheltered in their basement, but they were wrong.

They could not have seen and may not have heard the MiG fighter jets that rose, looped and turned in on their three-storey home from the north. The attack went silent as it struck and killed them, the quiet missiles outpacing the sound of the engines.

It is not often you can say you have seen two families wiped out, right in front of you. But we had been watching the two MiGs circle for an hour, a couple of miles north of the Free Syrian Army command post in whose yard we were standing and behind which, to their cost, stood the house the families shared.

At first they were making runs west to east. The flashes of the anti-tank guns on their underside showed up clearly against the blue planes and the blue sky. But the planes would pull out of their runs and climb south over the command post.

It had been like this for 48 hours, the FSA soldiers inside said. No one could understand why the MiGs hadn't attacked it: they must surely have known it was there.

If they didn't know before, they did now. When the final turn came and the planes disappeared ominously – too low to be seen – we realised we had stayed too long. We were running as the explosion took out the compound wall behind us.

We saw the smoke rise 50 yards from where we were, running again as the second plane came in. This time we were 30 yards away, the rubble from the explosion pouring down from the sky onto the steel shop-awning under which we sheltered.

We waited to see if they were coming back. We could still hear them circling. Men and boys came out on the street. After a few minutes in which the MiGs' drone was the only sound, a taxi screeched up, a middle-aged man pouring in his screaming teenage daughters, telling them to get out, to go to his family's village 25 miles away.

As the jets disappeared, we turned back to the billowing smoke. It was already clear that both missiles had missed their target, and where they had landed a crowd was already gathering, pulling free a body.

The face of ten-year-old Kausa al-Kayali was still pretty, a large bundle of thick black hair matted with dust falling over a snub-nosed face, patched red and black by the blast that killed her. Her head was attached to a torso that ended at her stomach. There was nothing else. The crowd shouted that God was Great.

Then it descended on the rubble, scratching desperately at the heaped concrete blocks. A bulldozer arrived; the crowd retreated, and some turned to hold back two crying uncles. The menfolk had been outside – the 11 people in the house were mostly women and children, including Kausa's three- and four-year-old brothers, Ahmed and Mustafa.

Two more men arrived on the scene. One was older, white-moustached, and held his hands up to the sky. "Oh Arab, why do you do this to Arabs?" he asked. He was drowned out by a high-pitched scream behind him, the unmistakable falsetto of grief. This was Ali al-Kayali, Kausa's father, lashing out, panting, trying to push through.

I asked his brother, Mustafa, why the family had not left. "We didn't have anywhere else to go," he said. "All of Syria is being bombed. Where are we supposed to go?

"We were very frightened but until now they have just been using helicopters to shoot. We hoped if we stayed in the basement we would be safe."

This is the dilemma for both the FSA and the Syrian army. The regime's media describe Aleppo as the decisive battle, yet its military has neither the skill, the morale nor the smart missiles for successful urban warfare.

The regime's troops are circling the city. But Aleppo still was open to FSA reinforcements yesterday, and as in previous sieges, notably of Homs, bombardment is anyway easier than entrusting the streets to a demoralised army whose soldiers continue to defect. Those remaining are often raw – two captives brought into the base yesterday were no more than teenagers, still in their jeans and T-shirts.

For this reason, the FSA are refusing to withdraw, and say they will make their stand here.

The civilian toll is heavy. Three bodies rolled up in a truck at the makeshift hospital behind the base, middle-aged men hit by rifle fire from a distance. Some local people are angry with the FSA for bringing the battle into their streets.

"I hate these guys," one man sidled up to say. "Why have they done this to us? They don't need to be here."

But whatever their tactics, those of their opponents are worse. "They are not like the Assads," the same man said. "For forty years they have stolen from us, killed us and lied to us. Look at them. They have to go now."


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