Ana Maria Luca , Nadine Elali

The man sitting in a living room in the northern Lebanese village of Wadi Khaled had crossed the border between Lebanon and Syria in the northern region of Akkar on foot, like the refugees. But he was not a refugee. He hadn’t run away in the middle of the night from the Syrian security forces shelling Homs to take shelter in a Lebanese relative’s house.

“I am an activist,” he introduced himself. “We don’t have the media there, so I had to come here to say what we have to say. It’s our only chance to meet with the media and make ourselves heard,” the man, who goes by the pseudonym Mohammad, told NOW Lebanon.

Mohammad had left Homs the night before with other protestors on a journey to see their refugee wives and children in North Lebanon. They escaped the western Syrian city by bypassing roads that were blocked by the security forces. Once in Lebanon, the men spread to their relatives’ houses and kept quiet, afraid that some intelligence agents in North Lebanon working for the Syrian regime might find out their identity.
“Homs is in a state of war,” one of the men, who goes by Mansour, told NOW Lebanon, while sitting in another house in Wadi Khaled with two friends who had crossed the border with him.

“They shoot people, and you see bodies in the streets because people are afraid to go out to collect them. If you could just go in there and see what they are doing! It’s nothing like anything I’ve seen before,” Ahmad, a short, dark-haired man with a deep voice said from across the room. “Is that thing taking pictures? We don’t want any pictures,” he said suddenly after seeing this journalist’s voice recorder. He explained that he and his two friends were involved in protests in Homs and that they tried to stay away from cameras even when people filmed them carrying wounded fellow protestors off the streets.

The three men who snuck into North Lebanon said that demonstrations in Homs have become more difficult to organize. “We used to gather in small groups in different places and march toward a meeting point, usually the central square. But they usually block the roads, and they don’t let the groups meet. They line up in the middle, and they shoot both ways. They kill everything that moves; there are snipers who shot a 12-year-old boy because he got up to get his bike back. They shoot at anybody who holds up his phone and tries to film,” said Mansour.
“They detain only Sunnis in our region. They get only men between 17 and 40, and they keep them in closed schools or stadiums. We didn’t even know how they can tell they are Sunnis. But we realized that our IDs have codes. If you’re Sunni, your code starts with 04, if you’re a Shia it starts with 03, it’s 02 if you’re Kurdish, and 07 is for Alawites,” Ahmad explained and showed that his ID code starts with 04. “They are also arming the Alawites, who formed these community watch groups. They know each other because they wear distinctive bracelets,” he added.

Mohammad, who stayed for two years in a Syrian prison during college, said traveling to Lebanon was his only opportunity to be able to speak out about the massacre going on in Homs, what the Syrian opposition really wants, and how the protestors plan to continue their anti-regime movement. His plan was to cross the border back to Syria during the night and sneak back into Homs to mobilize more protestors.
“We don’t have a leader, it’s true. But we are not dispersed people; we are a true opposition, we have a strategy. We will continue the protests,” he said, adding that the opposition plans to break out into flash mobs to make it difficult for security forces to shoot at people.

“We don’t want foreign intervention in Syria; we just want the world to impose real sanctions on Bashar al-Assad’s regime. The European Union sanctioned only arms deals and froze assets, but we know that Assad family assets are mainly in the Gulf countries, and we want them to sanction Bashar al-Assad, too. They say that [the president’s brother] Maher al-Assad is in charge [of the Republican Guard], but the orders come from the president,” Mohammad said. “We want peace. We are not armed, and we want to exchange the regime with a secular democratic one similar to Turkey,” he added.

He also confirmed what other refugees said about the Syrian security forces using Iranian-made anti-demonstration gear and trying to pressure some Lebanese leaders to either not discuss the issue or control their communities from getting involved. “That is why they called [Druze leader] Walid Jumblatt to Damascus. They want him to tell the Druze not to take to the streets. But we hope they won’t listen,” Mohammad said.

“The media is our only defense. If the media would be able to enter Syria and see the reality on the ground, the regime will be over,” he said. “We do not call for violence – we are not extremists. The regime wants the world to believe that we are extremists, that the country is going to turn into chaos and that the Baath Party rule is the key for regional stability. But oppression will only give birth to terror. Massacres will continue, and they won’t be able to hide them anymore.”