SUMMARY
On January 15 2013 a massacre was carried out on the small Syrian farming community of Hasawiya, located on the outskirts of Homs. Opposition sources place the total number of deaths at 105 - many of them women and children - and allege that they were carried out by regime gangs - known as Shabiha - who invaded the village along with Syrian military forces. A different version of events has been offered by the regime, which claims that the killing was done by armed rebel forces, specifically the jihadist rebel group Jabhat al-Nusra. This version was offered to visiting western journalists and backed up by the testimony of several men who were presented as survivors of the massacre.One visiting reporter and analysts who accepted the evidence which was presented to him took the view that this contradictory information made it impossible to determine who the real authors of this atrocity were.
I have reviewed as much of the available information as possible, with the assistance of Syrian oppositionists inside and outside the country, and come to a different conclusion. In my view the regime account fails to pass basic tests of credibility and coherence, and was presented in a highly prejudicial setting. The opposition account is far stronger on all counts - logic, coherence, and consistency with the known facts. My conclusion is that that it is beyond reasonable doubt that this was a crime perpetrated by the regime - executed by their Shabiha, most probably working in association with the Syrian army.
This is one of the most serious war crimes to have been perpetrated in Syria during the current conflict, and it is therefore to be hoped that the United Nations will carry out the sort of detailed investigation that it did over the very similar Houla massacre of June 2012, in order to establish a definitive account of the events.
