Man who lost son no longer fears death

Beirut: As the Syrian refugees crowded round to tell their stories of terror and escape, Ayman remained silent.

Squinting a little in the sun that relieved the cold of this early spring day in southern Turkey, he leaned — sometimes standing, sometimes slumped — against a giant concrete sign advertising a now-defunct motel.

He did not talk to the other half-dozen men who were gathered in front of their white-tented camp near the town of Reyhanli.

Nearby, children who had fled conflict played at soldiers, one crouching behind a car and mimicking the rattle of automatic weapon fire. While Ayman's companions talked at length about their escape from the violence of President Bashar Al Assad's security forces, Ayman seemed not so much bored as absent, radiating a sense of withdrawal that made it clear he had much to say.

When he finally spoke he immediately commanded attention as he described his journey through the military, prison, Italy, back to Syria — and into tragedy.

A marble craftsman from the Damascus suburbs, a centre of the anti-regime uprising, Ayman had gone with his 18-year-old son, Yasser, to a protest rally in the Syrian capital in January. Yasser was shot dead in front of him by shabbiha, or pro-regime militiamen; another killing to add to the more than 10,000 estimated to have taken place during what may go down in history as the ghastliest uprising of the Arab world revolts.

Even in the wartime chaos over times and places, Ayman was able to pinpoint the only event that really mattered.

Yasser, a keen swimmer and medical student at university in the northern city of Aleppo, had died exactly two months and four days ago, he said; he couldn't remember the date, only the time without his son.

Ayman's left arm, still heavily bandaged and almost immobile from a stroke he suffered shortly after his son's murder, was an outward sign of the anguish he had endured since. He did not appear to be in the physical condition or frame of mind to fight anyone, but he said he would continue the struggle against Al Assad.

By killing his child, the regime's forces had made him the most dangerous kind of opponent: the one who no longer fears death.

"Scusi, my son is killed," Ayman said, lapsing momentarily into the Italian phrases that pepper his conversation. "They cannot do anything more to me than that."

Syria's deadly crisis — the first anniversary of which was marked this week — is spawning a generation of Aymans.

Starkest battle

The scale of the violence is establishing the starkest battle yet for the soul of the uprisings sweeping the Arab world.

Unlike in Tunisia or Egypt, the opposition is facing the full force of their own country's army; unlike in Libya, they have few heavy weapons and no Nato warplanes to help them fight back.

The militarised groups of rebels that have sprung up have been implicated in killings of their own, though nowhere near the scale of those carried out by regime forces.

Thousands of Syrians had already died during this uprising before the government launched an assault in early February on opposition strongholds in the third city of Homs and elsewhere in the country. This was just before China and Russia vetoed United Nations Security Council action against Al Assad.

Activists and independent journalists in the Baba Amr district of Homs reported a siege of medieval barbarity, with indiscriminate shelling and government snipers killing hundreds of civilians on the pretext of flushing out members of the rebel Free Syrian Army.

The regime security forces retook Baba Amr on March 1, after which activists and residents reported a wave of reprisal killings and arrests.

When Valerie Amos, the UN humanitarian aid chief, was finally able to visit the district on March 7, she said she was "devastated" to see that part of the city "completely destroyed".

Since the regime recaptured Baba Amr, it has pressed on with its efforts to subdue armed and unarmed opposition in other areas of a revolt that has rolled from the southern city of Deraa to Idlib in the north. Few expect the Free Syrian Army, a loosely linked and lightly armed grouping of army defectors and civilian volunteers, to be able to resist. Some fighters have already been forced to flee across the border to southern Turkey, along with a growing number of refugees, who are also escaping to Lebanon.