In villages militants left one survivor per family to witness their brutality, while in Sweida city suicide bombers entered.
Karam Monther’s mother placed the ammunition box in her youngest son’s car, holding back her tears as he drove off in the dawn light to the frontline. News had come that Islamic State militants were storming homes on the eastern edges of his home province, Sweida, in southern Syria.
Monther joined two dozen other young men who had picked up arms and together they battled through to the edge of the nearby town of Rami. Fallen fighters lay strewn in the streets – the remains of the Isis militants in pieces after they detonated suicide vests.
A woman stumbled out of one of the the houses, repeating: “They slaughtered them.” Inside, she pointed to the bathroom.
“I felt in my heart that a crime had happened there,” Monther said. “I opened the door slowly, and I saw a mother holding her children, but it appeared she hadn’t been able to protect them from Daesh’s [Isis] gunshots.”
“I will never forget this scene all my life. No words can describe it. I knelt and wept in grief,” he said.
Residents of Sweida began burying their dead on Thursday, a day after the worst Isis atrocity in recent months claimed the lives of nearly 250 people – a toll that may yet rise.
Dozens were kidnapped and wounded, many are missing, and the slaughter has upended the peace of the ancestral homeland of the minority Druze sect, which had so far largely escaped the violence that devastated much of Syria.
Interviews with Sweida residents offered a glimpse into a brutal but well-planned, 12-hour attack that appeared to have evaded government security forces – and displayed the terror that Isis can still sow despite its repeated battlefield defeats and retreat across Syria and Iraq.
The raids began at about 4am on three simultaneous fronts. Under the cover of darkness, the militants infiltrated Druze towns and villages in the east and north-east of Sweida, some using local Bedouin as guides.