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Reflecting on Syria’s new graveyards

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Summary of story from Time, August 15, 2011

There is a small, grassless public garden in a residential area just off Hama’s Street 40, delineated by a modest metal fence and full of olive trees laden with unripe fruit.

In it there are also nine – fresh – graves of locals whom residents say were killed during the Syrian security forces’ recent bloody assault on this city.

A girl and her brother are buried here, side by side; 16-year-old Bayan Hassan al-Masryand  her 20-year-old brother Safwan.

One grave in the makeshift cemetery that is better maintained than most is that of Milad Gomosh, a young man killed on July 31, whose heartbroken mother tends to it every day.

And there are other gardens turned graveyards in the city.

At one Abu Ali points to three graves: “This is the martyr Yasser al-Nashar, he was about 20 years old. This is a woman from the Dayri family. And we don’t know who this is. He was an old man. Why would they kill him?”

There are also reports of many mass graves scattered throughout the city, dating back to 1982, when former Syrian President Hafez Assad, father of the current leader, Bashar Assad, sent his military, into Hama to crush an Islamist insurgency killing maybe 10,000 people.

“My home was burned, I lost my brother, four cousins, all in all, 12 members of my family,” says a woman, speaking of that time, who gave her name as Salwa.

“When we rose up [this time], we knew what this regime can do,” says Abu Warde.

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