‘British airstrikes did not save my daughter’
TARIQ AL-RAZ was out trying to find biscuits for his five-year-old daughter when he heard news of the attack.
Damascus regime forces and their Shia militia allies were assaulting a rural area near Homs, not far from where his wife and two children were waiting for him to return to their oneroom house.
Mr Raz borrowed a neighbour’s motorcycle and raced back to his home. He found his wife standing in a field with the body of Aseenat, their daughter, in her arms, the little girl’s brown hair matted with blood.
Aseenat was killed just one hour’s drive from where RAF warplanes had blown up one of President Bashar alassad’s chemical weapons sites on Saturday morning. She died 36 hours after the Tornado GR4S struck their target and returned to their base in Cyprus.
“The British strikes did nothing to save my daughter,” Mr Raz told The Daily Telegraph. “I am living in a nightmare and I keep hoping I will wake up.”
His daughter’s death is an illustration of how little the weekend’s strikes have done to slow the merciless gears of the war. Within hours of the West’s attacks, Syrian and Russian aircraft were back in the skies and the regime’s ground forces were again on the march.
“This goes to show that strikes have had no effect on the civil war and that wasn’t their purpose to begin with,” said Michael Horowitz, a senior analyst at the Le Beck geopolitical consultancy.
Last week, the regime captured the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, including the Douma neighbourhood where 70 people were killed in a suspected chemical attack. Assad’s forces now appear to have their sights on a swathe of rebel-held countryside near Homs. They have captured several villages since resuming their offensive on Sunday.
Aseenat, her parents and Fadi, her younger brother, had been living in this opposition-held pocket for the past five years, hoping the war would one day end and Assad would be toppled.
Mr Raz, 30, was a farmer before the war but now does odd jobs to try to feed his family.
He said that Aseenat had pleaded with him to go and find biscuits on Sunday afternoon. While he was searching, word began to spread that regime forces were closing in.
“She was shot in the head. The blood was flowing from her head and it covered her face and her hair,” Mr Raz said.
He cradled her in his arms and climbed on to a neighbour’s motorcycle as they drove frantically to the Zafarana hospital six miles away.
Medics tried to resuscitate her without success and, in the end, they could do nothing more than remove the heavy machine-gun round that had lodged in her jaw.
Mohammed Berjawi, a nurse, said: “This is a crime against humanity.”