Syria's crackdown: Why did Fawaz die?

Secret police are raiding hospitals to round up people who were injured during anti-government protests.

Hugh Macleod and a special correspondent
Al-Jazeera

"Fawaz al-Haraki had only minutes to live. As the shots rang out, Abu Haidar and the other protesters ran for cover, grimly familiar with what to do when the mukhabberat (secret police) attacked. But Fawaz fell, the blood soaking his trousers where the bullet from a Syrian secret policeman had torn into his leg.

It was Friday April 22 in the industrial city of Homs, famous for being the nation's main producer of jokes and cement. Few are laughing for Homs or its dirty factory these days. Last Friday, 11-year-old Aiham al-Ahmad became the latest among dozens of people killed in Homs since the city rose up in some of the largest numbers yet seen to call for freedom and an end to the Assad family's 41-year-old dictatorship.

As the bullets sparked off the street around them, Abu Haidar and two other protesters hauled 42-year-old Fawaz into a car, desperate to get him to a doctor before his time ran out.

But Fawaz, growing pale under a blanket in the backseat of Abu Haider's car, was already a dead man: Killed not only by a bullet, but by the regime's decision – appearing, increasingly, to be systematic – to prevent injured protestors from receiving medical care.....

Treated or tortured?

Injured protestors in the custody of security forces also stand less chance of receiving adequate medical care, according to testimony from doctors speaking to Al Jazeera and human rights researchers.

"When we were treating patients from the protests the mukhaberrat said to us, 'You don't have to take care for these people, you have to care for the injured security men,'" the doctor who treated patients in police custody told Al Jazeera.

"As doctors we have our priorities, but the mukhaberrat don't accept our priorities. It's not like they say, 'We will kill you if you care for the patients,' but the doctors cannot say no to them. They are very afraid."

As Al Jazeera first reported last month, Syrian doctors have come under direct pressure not to treat injured protesters.....

But Fawaz's funeral had the power of numbers. Born aloft by a procession of some 6,000 mourners, Fawaz's body was carried not to the outskirts of the city, but straight to the Martyrs' cemetery in central Homs, an act of defiance at the last, an assertion of rights in death which the regime had so systematically removed from his life, even in its last minutes."