TAFTANAZ, syria — The main street of this once-bustling Syrian farm town stands eerily quiet, its shops charred black from arson, its shoppers replaced by cats roaming the rubble of homes destroyed by tank fire.
At dawn April 3, Syrian forces shelled the town in the first volley of what residents say was a massive assault after a string of protests calling for the end of the regime of President Bashar Assad. Soldiers then stormed in, torching homes and businesses and gunning down residents in the streets. By the time they left on the third day, at least 62 people were dead.
Two months later, the destruction remains, but most residents are gone. Locals estimate that about two-thirds of the town’s 15,000 people have left. Most don’t expect them to return.
“There is nothing for people to come back to, and they worry that if they rebuild, the army will destroy it again,” said resident Bassam Ghazzal, who lost more than 20 members of his extended family in the attack. “People don’t want to become refugees twice.”
Example of brute force
The destruction in Taftanaz provides an on-the-ground example of the huge price paid by Syrian communities that have chosen to defy one of the Middle East’s most brutal autocracies.
Since the start of the anti-Assad uprising in March 2011, the regime has responded to unrest with brute force, dispatching snipers, troops and tanks to quash dissent. Activists say more than 14,000 people have been killed, many of them civilians.
In general, the violence has not stopped the uprising. Rather it has emboldened protesters and galvanized international condemnation.
Taftanaz tells a different story. It is a place where overwhelming force appears to have not only crushed a protest movement but struck a blow against a community that might never recover.
In many ways, Taftanaz, a jumble of simple concrete homes surrounded by golden wheat fields about 9 miles from the northern city of Idlib, tells the story of Syria’s uprising, writ small.
Residents had long complained of state neglect and corruption that left many living in poverty, Ghazzal said. So when protesters inspired by the successful uprisings against autocrats in Tunisia and Egypt took to the streets in Syria, they followed along.
Bloody crackdown
Local security officers ended the protest, but the town organized more, sparking further crackdowns by regime authorities, Ghazzal said.
The Syrian army raided the village three times in the next four months, Ghazzal said. During a June raid, Ghazzal’s cousin was shot dead at a regime checkpoint while trying to flee, making him the first of the town’s “martyrs.”
Others followed. Some in the town took up arms, and five residents died in an October clash between the army and local rebels. Other residents buried them and held another protest the same day, Ghazzal said.
Then all was quiet until April 3, when tanks shelled the town from four sides before armored cars brought in dozens of soldiers who dragged civilians from their homes and gunned them down in the streets, witnesses said. The soldiers looted, destroyed and torched hundreds of homes.
Residents are unsure what sparked the assault. The town had only a small rebel presence, though fighters from the area had killed soldiers at checkpoints or destroyed regime tanks, said local fighter Sahir Schaib. He suspects the regime sought to stop the town from emerging as a protest center, especially because it is near a military base.
