The Brutal Sectarian History of Western, Zionist and Turkish Proxies in Syria
By Vanessa Beeley – Apr 13, 2025
In recent weeks, a harrowing testimony came to light from the Syrian coastal area. The testimony of an Alawite father from the Hama countryside, on the brutal murder of his son by Jolaniâs terrorist gangs (HTS).
On March 7th, HTS terrorists stormed the village of Al Rasafa in the Masyaf countryside (south of Homs). They raided homes, abusing and beating the residents. The fatherâs eldest son was abducted along with his younger child who is suffering from cancer.
As the terrorists withdrew, another group intervened to secure the return of the sick child to his family. When the father enquired about his eldest son, the terrorists replied that he would be interrogated.
Shortly after, the father received a call from his sonâs mobile phone. The voice on the other end mocked him, telling him that âwe sent [your son] to Hafez Al Assadâ.
Then the same voice told him where to find his sonâs mutilated corpse which had been dumped near the village barberâs shop – after they had torn the boyâs heart from his chest. The father was forced to confront the full horror of his sonâs death when he went to retrieve the body.
The fatherâs statement with English subtitles:
In 2018, I visited the Latakia countryside on the coast to speak with survivors of the Nusra Front/Free Syrian Army attacks back in 2013 that led to one of the worst massacres of the regime change war that began back in 2011. A war that was orchestrated and backed by the US/UK/EU/”Israel”/Turkey/Qatar/Saudi-Arabia alliance.
This is what I wrote after speaking with one of the victims, Ramez Badeâa Saleem and his family:
In August 2013, one of the most appalling massacres of the Syrian conflict was carried out in the northern countryside of Latakia, in Ballouta and surrounding villages. An estimated 200 villagers were massacred by a combination of the “moderate” FSA, Nusra Front (Al Qaeda) and Ahrar Al Sham.
A further 200 were kidnapped, including many children. In Septemeber 2018 I spoke with one family in Ballouta. The father, Ramez Bade’a Saleem, describes what happened to his family and neighbours that day, when their world was turned into a bloodbath before their eyes.
Surrounded by his children who survived kidnapping and ordeals in terrorist captivity, but who are clearly still affected by their experiencesâRamez tells me he sleeps with a full gas canister behind the door so if the terrorists return, he will kill himself and his children rather than allow them to be kidnapped or tortured again.
He tells me that his wife threw herself off the rooftop of their home, only to be shot dead by the terrorists on the ground. An elderly man, 90 years old had his throat slit while he was sleeping, two of Ramez’ neices were murdered in their car. He speaks of the dismemberment of corpses, the disovery of mass graves containing body parts, severed arms and legs in among the discarded bodies of men, women, and children.
It is impossible to describe the suffering I saw in this man’s eyes, the weary sorrow in his mother’s expression, or the collective shock that still hovers in the faces of the children and their withdrawn-from-this-world eyes.
Because of the economic sanctions, imposed by the US Coalition for “humanitarian” reasonsâthis family can barely survive. Ramez has limited work opportunities since the crisis and can barely make enough to feed his children. They are being forced to face death and destitution from every perspective, thanks to the West and their “democratic rebels.”
At the end of the interview, Ramez begs that God will rid Syria, and finally, Idlib, of the terrorist monsters:
“I pay special tribute to Iran, Russia, Hezbollah, and to President Bashar al-Assad, and ask them not to leave anyone of those bastards (the terrorists in Idlib) alive, because they are not humans and if they didn’t kill us today, they will kill us tomorrow, and they are going to kill every honorable person in this world, they don’t allow any honorable people to exist… I pray to God to get rid of them for us, please God get rid of them for us, I swear to God they are in Idlib and we are here and we cannot sleep. My sister, they are not humans, who ever they see…, if they saw a child, they slaughter him, and if they see an old person, they slaughter him, they leave nothing untouched. How can you deal with such people, I pray to God to get rid of them for us, that’s all I ask for.”
On every level, the ordinary people of Syria are the ones bearing the brunt of this hideous and senseless war that has literally torn their hearts apart, one by one. No family, no child should have to witness or endure such horror and monstrous and demonic violence. They have survived, but at what cost to their future, their physical and spiritual well being? It should never have been allowed to happen. Too much suffering, too much pain.
From an article published in 2014, an eyewitness report:
“In August 2013, Radical Islamic terrorists entered at night the sleeping village of Ballouta … They went methodically from house to house killing men, women and children in their beds. They cut open the stomach of a pregnant woman and hung the fetus in the trees.
Many survivors ran for their lives and later gave their eye witness reports of what happened. The Radical Islamic terrorists kidnapped 100 small children, and a few older females … [they were held] in a basement underground in the Syrian village of Selma’. 44 of the Ballouta children were released in a mid-2014 prisoner swap, nine months later. [..] From evidence of those released: ‘they endured torture, abuse and some of the children [were] killed by the terrorists. They said their captors were a mixed group: some were Syrian and many were foreigners … several of the terrorists spoke Arabic … [but] also spoke English much of the time among themselves’.”
Watch my interview here:
This is the second report on my conversation with Ramez:
Prior to the interview with Ramez and his children and those of his brothers whose parents were murderd by the terrorist groups, I spoke to Ramez and his mother alone.
At one point Ramez breaks down and asks for his children to come and be with him so he can speak about what happened to them. He tells us that he is told not to cry but even the “rocks cry for what happened in our region”, his mother tells us she cries every day even before the “sun rises”.
It is impossible to comprehend the brutality and the trauma that has arisen from these acts of wanton violence that defy description. Ramez’ wife was murdered by the terrorists after she had tried to throw herself off a rooftop to safety. His sisters in law were massacred, his nieces shot in the car as they tried to take shelter. His own children were kidnapped, the youngest a toddler, the eldest was held for more than 3 years. When she was finally returned, she was “skin and bones”.
All the time I was talking to the family, this daughter, the eldest, was distant and removed from the conversationâperhaps unable to bear the recall of her captivity. God only knows what these monsters did to her during those 3 years in which she lost her childhood in the fog of war.
Please share these voices that are muted by the corporate media shills in the West who only wish to reduce these victims to ‘supporters of their government and army,’ while elevating their murderers and torturers to “rebels” and “moderates.”
The inference being, of course, that those who support the Syrian government and army in their campaign to rid Syria of the FUKUS terrorist alliance, somehow deserve the horrors they have to endureâbecause their suffering does not serve the “regime change” war agenda.
Remember, this was written in 2018 about a massacre that took place in 2013, in the Latakia countryside, on the coast, among the Alawite and Shia communities. The same pretext for the Western-sponsored proxy brutality was usedânow those being tortured and brutally murdered are âregime remnantsâ, back then they were âgovernment supportersâ worthy only of death.
Nusra Front became Hayat Tahrir Al Sham under the leadership of Abu Mohammed Al Jolani, now rebranded as Ahmed Al Sharaa. The same sectarian, fanatical ideology has not changed despite the attempt of an MI6 make-over to present these mass murderers as a legitimate political entity.
When I visited areas of Homs City that had been taken over by the so-called Free Syrian Army, I was told of similar crimes by a woman who survived the atrocities committed by the terrorist factionsâincluding âplaying football with a fetus torn from a womanâs bellyâ and stripping women naked, forcing them to walk through the streets, tying one woman between two cars and driving the cars apart until the inevitable happened.
I also remember speaking to a contact originally from the Shia Muslim villages of Kafarya and Foua (in Idlib), whose father, Dr. Ali Al Moustafa, was the only surgeon in the two villages treating the daily wounded from the sniping and shelling by Nusra Front and Ahrar Al Sham factions besieging the two communities. I was told that the terrorists would impale the heads of their own dead on stakes around the villages to strike fear into the hearts of the residents.
I was in Aleppo City, in April 2017, when the buses bringing refugees from Kafarya and Foua to Rashideen in Aleppo were targeted by a suicide truck. Starving children were lured by the Nusra Front terrorists to their deaths with bags of chips as the truck approached, laden with explosives.
Shadi Badawi staggered to the door of the front bus that had just received the full force of the blast. Badawi was injured in his stomach, his right arm and his left hand was almost separated from his wrist. The terrorists approached him and they laughed at him:
âThey asked me who did this to you, the terrorists or Assad? I replied you did it. They offered me money to say it was Assad, I refused. They laughed at me and they said, let your hand fall off, you won’t be needing it. They walked away from me, they didnât help any of us. They left us to die.â – Shadi Badawi
In Aleppo, I met with people who had turned inward with physical and emotional pain, people whose grief and shock was still unexplored territory, people who were trying, desperately, with every fibre of their fractured souls, to put their lives back together piece by piece. People living in the most basic of housing with few belongings, who still took pride in preparing tea, coffee, and producing cake for their visitors. People who must be asking themselves why, why this incomprehensible suffering, why such bloodshed among neighbours who had always co-existed peacefully before the west brought war to Syria and divided communities, turning them against one another.
In the aftermath of the Rashideen suicide bombing, dead and injured children were thrown into the back of Nusra Front trucks and taken to areas close to the border with Turkey. Until now, an estimated 50 children are still missingâpresumed dead or taken for their organs.
In 2013, the BBC interviewed a ârebel leaderâ who ate the heart of a martyred Syrian Arab Army soldier while his âmoderateâ fighters cheered him on.
From the BBC attempt to normalise cannibalism among the âfreedom fightersâ that preyed upon the Syrian people from 2011 onwards:
The video says otherwise. It is one of the most gruesome to emerge from Syria’s civil war. In it, Abu Sakkar stands over an enemy corpse, slicing into the flesh.
“It looks like you’re carving him a Valentine’s heart,” says one of his men, raucously. Abu Sakkar picks up a bloody handful of something and declares: “We will eat your hearts and your livers, you soldiers of Bashar the dog.”
Then he brings his hand up to his mouth and his lips close around whatever he is holding. At the time the video was released, in May, we rang him and he confirmed to us that he had indeed taken a ritual bite (of a piece of lung, he said).
While the BBC tried to dismiss Abu Sakkar as one âbad appleâ back in 2013âthe cutting of an Alawite heart from the chest of a murdered body demonstrates that such demonic practices are far from isolated.
In 2014, another sectarian massacre was carried out by the Nusra Front gangs and Free Syrian Army in the industrial city of Adra, to the north of Damascus.
According to Syrian news agencies at the timeâthe industrial town of around 20,000 people was captured by âarmed terrorist groups affiliated to Jabhat al Nusraâ on Wednesday December 11, 2014.
RT, using eyewitness accounts from escapees, reported on December 17 that around 80 civilians were murdered by what Adra residents called âthe decapitatorsâ.
âThey had lists of government employeesâ a man who had escaped from Adra said.
âThey went to the addresses they had ⌠forced the people out and subjected them to the so-called Sharia trials ⌠They sentenced them to death by beheading ⌠The eldest was only 20 years old ⌠I saw them with my own eyes. They killed fourteen people with a machete.â
Syrian Social Affairs Minister Kinda al Shammat told RT: âCivilians told us that the workers of an Adra bakery were all executed and burned [in bakery ovens] during the first hours of the attack.â She said âwhole families were massacred.’â
Another escapee told RT: âThey killed everyone at the Adra Ummalia police station. And they killed everyone at the Adra Ummalia hospital where my sister works. She stayed alive only because she didnât turn up for work that day.â
Beheaded bodies from Adra were proudly displayed by the terrorists and have been republished widely (Alalam News and Intifada Palestine, December 17 and 20). Severed heads were also said to have been hung from trees.
In additionâ a large force of Nusra Front terrorists had arrived to the industrial city of Adra around four o’clock in the morning and besieged the residents. About 200 people were then chosen according to their religious affiliations (Alawites, Druze, Christians and Shi’a) and were either shot dead or beheaded.
How Syriaâs HTS Is Quietly Dismantling the Palestinian Cause
Crusader Cannibalism in Syria 1098
âI shudder to tell that many of our people, harassed by the madness of excessive hunger, cut pieces from the buttocks of the Saracens already dead there, which they cooked, but when it was not yet roasted enough by the fire, they devoured it with savage mouth.â Fulcher of Chatres.
Antiochâin modern-day Turkiyeâwas captured by the Crusaders led by Raymond of Toulouse and Bohemond of Taranto in June 1098 after a year-long siege. This was followed by the fall of the fortified city of Maâaraat Al-Numan, in what is today Syria, which surrendered to the Crusaders who had laid siege to it around the end of November the same year.
The invaders wanted the city to boost their dwindling supplies and extend their control of the Holy Land. The ultimate prize was Jerusalem in Palestine, which fell on 15 July 1099, and had to wait 88 years to be liberated by Sultan Salah Al-Din Al-Ayyubi (known in the West as âSaladinâ).
Details of Crusader savagery are recorded in this Middle East Monitor article.
A few of the Maâarra Muslim residents fled what is now a city in Idlib and reached safety in Aleppo, Homs and Hama. By the time the Crusaders, led by Raymond, reached the city, around 10,000 Muslims remained within the city walls.
Raymond, already ridiculed by the locals for his failed attempts to take the city, laid siege to the inhabitants. As winter approached, his troops began to starve without adequate supply lines.
Eventually the invaders built siege towers, which were completed within ten days. They managed to breach the walls on 11 December, forcing the citizens into the city defended by a poorly trained and equipped militia. For the most part, the Crusaders decided to settle down for the night before plundering the city the next day. A peaceful surrender was negotiated with leading members of the town which included safe passage. However, by dawn, some of the poorer and hungrier Crusaders began to plunder the city.
On the morning of December 12, the other Crusaders realised that whatever little food was left had been taken. They went on a violent rampage across Maâarra. Nobody was safe. One contemporary observer recorded that, âNo corner of the town was clear of Saracen corpses, and one could scarcely go about the streets except by treading on their dead bodies.â
The carnage didnât end with the mass murder of men, women and children; the starving Crusaders turned to cannibalism with the many corpses. One chronicler, Radulph of Caen, noted that, âSome people said that, constrained by the lack of food, they boiled pagan adults in cooking pots, impaled children on spits and devoured them grilled.â
Fulcher of Chartres acknowledged the savagery committed by the Christian soldiers: âI shudder to tell that many of our people, harassed by the madness of excessive hunger, cut pieces from the buttocks of the Saracens already dead there, which they cooked, but when it was not yet roasted enough by the fire, they devoured it with savage mouth.â
There has been some scholarly debate as to the root cause of this infamous episode in the First Crusade, with some placing blame on the most impoverished soldiers, known as the Tafurs, while a desperate general response to starvation has also been suggested. Some sources state that the poorer Christian forces cut open the bodies of the dead to look for coins hidden in the stomachs before cooking and eating scraps of flesh from the bodies. Eventually the human remains were dragged outside the city, where they were burnt in large piles.
It is claimed that the Crusaders tried to distance themselves from the act of mass cannibalism, an act of the âminorityâ. Just as the BBC tried to distance the collective neo-Crusader movement in the West from the act of heart-eating by ârebelâ Abu Sakkar. However, according to historical analysis:
During the First Crusade (1095â99) the Franks cannibalized the Muslim dead at the city of Ma`arra. More than a dozen narrative sources describe this act, but with significant differences in detail. Through an examination of the different accounts and of the probable historical, biblical, and literary models used to shape them, this article suggests that cannibalism was in part a product of necessity but also that the crusaders used it as a tool of psychological warfare. Their status as God’s warriors and their project of holy war both justified and inspired such tactics.
It is impossible to disconnect the successive regimes in the UK, US and EU from the actions of the terrorist proxy forces they unleashed upon the Syrian people from 2011 onwards, whose crimes are dismissed as âacts of a minorityâ or the justified revenge against “regime remnants.”
The origins of wanton brutality and savagery against innocent civilians, including children, lie in the Crusader mentality of the neocolonialist cartelâyou only need to look at the rape, torture, dismemberment of corpses, organ theft and horrific abuse of Palestinians by the British-incubated Zionist military to see that history is not only repeating itselfâit has become the epitome of pure evil that all Humanity must reject and destroy.
Vanessa Beeley
Vanessa Beeley is an independent journalist, peace activist, photographer and associate editor at 21st Century Wire. Vanessa was a finalist for one of the most prestigious journalism awards â the 2017 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism â whose winners have included the likes of Robert Parry in 2017, Patrick Cockburn, Robert Fisk, Nick Davies and the Bureau for Investigative Journalism team. You can support Vanessaâs journalism through her Patreon Page.
