Hi, I will make this record in a way that it can be transferred to other people. So I will not make it personalised without giving my name, because we don't feel secure here.

It's been six days now that we are trapped in Suwayda that is totally besieged. And this is something that should be repeated again and again. It's totally besieged by the regime forces, by the regime of Sharaa. (ed. Ahmed al-Sharaa, president of Syria, a founding member of al-Nusra Front and subsequently Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), Sunni Islamist paramilitaries.)

the water is going down. We have less and less water. We have no electricity. So the water we have, we have to take it from the tank, with buckets. We have no electricity, no connection. It's been gone since the first day. It was cut in purpose. I remember exactly when we had the news by the local media that the lines were cut. It was exactly at the beginning of the conflict.

It was cut. And this line is the higher line of electricity, the line that is for Suwayda and for Daraa. So the both were cut. We can see that, there are lights. I mean, there are lights there. So the line going to Daraa is working.

So if the regime wanted to re-establish the line, they can re-establish the lines. Anyway, they cut the electricity, they cut the DSL. So we have a we had no connection to internet, despite, at the very precise moment it was yesterday, or No, It was before yesterday, when the word is this “fasil” (ed. Unsure here) which is the call of the tribes to come to Suwayda. It was a very aggressive call, where that brought 1000s of tribesmen from very different places, from different regions in Syria, they came to to attack, and their discourse was very clear on the social media that they come to kill, they come for revenge. They come to kill the Kafir and what they call the “Hajiri militias”, (Hikmat al-Hijri is a leader of Druze peoples) which is a discourse of the regime to identify all the factions of of community self defence of the region of Suwayda, which is very diverse, not all supporting Hajiri. Many of them, they are not supporting Hajiri. So they are not responsible for this, what this Hajiri is doing, and anyway, Hajiri is not related to the beginning of this conflict this time. It's related to conflict between local communities and their factions, respective factions, from the tribes and from the Druze..

I'm a foreign citizen. I'm here since February. I've been trapped here for six days. We were gratefully trapped in a place that is not affected directly, neither by the bombing and the constant bombing of shells, mortar shells, neither by the killings. We are 10 kilometres from this area, away more south of the country of the region, even 20 kilometres from Suwayda City.

And so we experienced all these horrible moments since six days that I will not describe the previous days. I will just describe the day of yesterday. Maybe it can be used this record to be spread, to be shared with journalists, to be used as podcasts. I will describe something that is very harsh. It will be maybe long, but I think it's essential that I don't miss any detail.

I want to say also that because of the siege, we have no food, or less and less food, so we can eat still, but there is no fresh diary, no fresh products, no vegetables in the shops. Most of the shops, they are closed. There is no fuel. The fuel was used to resist, to protect the community, to put in the cars that bring the fighters on the front lines with the Islamists. So the fuel is very rare, so moving is very hard, and that's why yesterday, it was hard to go to Suwayda, but we succeeded, because after the city was freed by the local factions, many people from the South were refugees. We have now almost 100,000 people who fled the north to the south in direction of Salkhad and the Jordanian border.

So people, they wanted to go back to the city to check their flats, to check their relatives. So use this opportunity to go with a van there.

You have to imagine that many places are empty, the villages that were not directly affected. People, they still go to the streets, but the shops are closed, and people are all all at home, and many people, they are mourning also: their relatives. So the cities they look dead at some point. It's like ghost cities. Yesterday, it was a bit more lively because, yeah, there is all these people trying to move around, to go back and to have a check and or to move their things.

And so we went with the van and we witnessed on the road, the damage entering Suwayda you have, you have big damage. You have to remember that the Islamists, they came from the West South West and North. So all this area West and North is totally damaged. Many villages. They were burned down. There were many massacres. And there are many massacres that still have not been discovered because, I mean, in each house, you have to check what's happened and many, many, many houses, they are burned. They were looted. There were many trucks from the Islamist groups going back to Daraa, which is the the Western Province next to Suwayda, with all the things that they looted, fridges, furniture like, whatever.

So you see the damage on the road, and then you see some you see these tanks, these few tanks, like, I think, almost three or four tanks in Suwayda city that were that were (air)striked by the Israeli planes on the first day, only on the first day, or mainly on the first day. Maybe there were some other strikes, like this morning. But it's wrong to say that the Israeli army was targeting all the groups and that they saved the community. Yes, they helped. It's true. Whatever is our opinion about Israel, and my opinion is very critical. I hate this colonial country, and the people here, most of them, they were not supporting Israel. Many people, They were making protest even under the Assad regime. When they were the protest against the Assad regime, some of the protests, they were to support the Gazans,

And so you see these tanks that were destroyed by the strikes. And then you see the damage on the on private property, on the buildings, many, many flats. They are burnt, black buildings, some of them, they are still burning. I mean, there's the smoke.

We just had to check quickly because we wanted to go to the hospital. But when we turn right to the direction, direction of the hospital. We saw a car that was targeted with many bullet impacts and full of blood. And you see that was a civilian car inside. You see the blood on the seats and on the back seat, and there are the things, shoes and the things of a child. It's full of blood.

Then we go further and we see another car that is also was targeted in the same way. It's like the Islamists, they were just roaming in the streets and shooting everything that was moving. And it's very obvious. It's very obvious in what you see, how you see the things they were looting shops, burning down, the things destroying statues that they don't like, and including statues related to the Syrian revolution against Bashar Al-Assad.

And we arrived in the hospital. So there is a roundabout next to the hospital that is totally damaged. The trees destroyed. There was a real battle there. We see some ambulances, there there is a lot of tension. There's a lot here. There is a lot of people, and they are now everywhere, some fighters who are trying to protect and protect the streets. So there is some tension, because they needed cars. They had, don't have enough cars to go and pick up the injured and dead. So we entered the hospital, and they allow us to take pictures. So we documented.

The hospital was besieged and was taken by the Islamist and the Syrian army. So first, one of the first thing they did is they removed the internal forces. So these are local residents working for the Ministry of Interior. So the ministry so the soldiers of the Ministry of Defence, killed with the RPG, the internal security policemen who were supposed to protect the hospital, and then they entered the hospital. They made field execution inside the hospital, and they besieged it, and there were snipers around who were targeting, and one tank even, was targeting the people trying to reach the hospital to be to be healed.

And then they say, come with us. We will show you the dead bodies. And so you go out on the side of the hospital, the Southern side and the back the backyard, you have hundreds of bodies, hundreds of decomposing bodies who are just like in piles on the ground. All around you have this dry, sticky blood everywhere on the ground. So they gave us things to protect our shoes. The smell is horrendous. You cannot imagine, if you didn't experience this before. You have some volunteers, very young volunteers, who are trying to help and trying to sort and trying to identify the victims, and they put the names and the age of the bags. And you see that a lot of people, they are old people, they are civilians, they are women, they are children. There are some. They have been killed, obviously, in a very gruesome way. We enter the hospital. We visit the same and we see like, bodies, bodies, bodies, bodies, blood everywhere. And among them, people executed in the hospital.

Then we go with the car in the South Western part. It's the neighborhood in the South Western part of Suwayda is on one of the access from Daraa direction of the village of Kanakir was heavily targeted by shelling and confrontation, killing and whatever. This neighborhood is very, very damaged also, many places are looted. We spoke with the residents of the whole street, where they arrived as a convoy, and they just did whatever they want. So you can imagine, I think I will not describe in details. We spoke with survivors, people who were witnessing, who were seeing all this from the window. Some of them, they were even interacting with the general security. They were just lucky that they didn't want to kill them. They explained how one of them, he was crying, an old man, he was crying, explaining how they were putting the gun on his head and threatening him, and then he were they were letting him and stealing everything from him.

There's also, like, cars everywhere. There are cars on our way to this place. They were everywhere, cars that are just civilian cars that were targeted and people killed inside. And there's one house there in the street that was attacked. They were a man and his son. They were killed because they tried to resist when they came and everything was looted, burned also.

And then we went from the Western Corniche, we went to the neighborhood located at the North West entrance. So it's called the Mazra'a Street. It's in direction of Daraa, but from another road leading to Mazra'a. So this is the first place where the regime forces, they came from with the Islamist, the Islamists came before them, with them, and after them, all these six days. They entered the city, and they massacred everyone there. They killed a lot of people. So you arrive at Omran roundabout. It's the main it's the first roundabout before you enter the city.

And we passed first in a street next to it, where we have some relatives and friends living. There you have also burnt cars. And we met one guy who was very, very, very, very affected, very nervous, very he was shouting and he said he was taking us with him and saying, “Come with Come with me. Come with me. I will show I will show you what, what they did”. So he brought us in, in one first place, where, in the garden, he said, “you see here I buried three bodies, burned people who were burnt alive. It was an old man, his wife and their daughter” he said, I buried them myself here in this garden. And he showed us the grave. Then he brought us to the to their house. And here it's horrific scene, horrific because the whole house was burned. You see exactly the this office (ed. Unsure), this living room where they were killed and burnt, or burned and killed. We don't know exactly the guy said they were burnt alive. You see the armchair of the old man. It's burnt also in the middle of the room. The whole room is burned. The whole house is burnt.

There are two, two guys who are their sons, the sons and the brothers.They were very, very stoned. Trying to wash themselves. They were black and trying... so we talked to them, we and they were just crying, just crying. Basically, it was very hard, very hard.

After this, we visited the house next to it that was a whole flat that was burned, and it was still smoking, and it was very hot inside. This happened hours ago, just hours ago, after six days of massacres and in the same street like you see many buildings they are burnt. You see many, many buildings are burnt. They enter just in some randomly, in some buildings, they go into flats that they can open, and they burned everything inside after they looted everything. And there they were also a dead body, but of an Islamist and he had with him scissors from his pocket. And the guys with us, they said, we think this is the scissors they took with them. And they did it in many cases. And they documented the Islamist. They cut the mustache of the Druze because it's a bit of the symbol. And the Islamist, they they remove the mustache, they keep only the beard, so the mustache is a bit of the symbol that they use to to mock, to mock the Druze, because the Druze Sheikhs, they all have a mustache, but they don't have a beard, only the old ones, they were a beard, but mainly the mustache is very representative.

So they came and they made a lot of videos that we saw also all this time, all these days we saw all this video was coming from the Islamist, very happy about humiliating people and raise, shaving their mustache in front of the camera and humiliating, insulting them, saying like pigs and dogs, and some of them, they were, many of them, they were executed after they made this video. So they said, this guy, he had the scissors for this. He came with scissors to remove the mustache of those civilians.

And then I will describe the last place we went before I stop with the car. We went through streets where many flats, they are still smoking from the fires. We arrive on Omran square, where a lot of battles happened. Now there are fighters who are protecting the place. They keep the place. And everything is destroyed around this square. There's a targeted destroyed car on the side, and next to it, you have two, two corpses, two bodies. One of them, he's attached. He has a rope on the on the right leg. He has a rope that suggests that he was pulled with the car after or before being killed.

And you have two other bodies on the roundabout in the middle of the streets. They can be fighters. They can be civilians. There are guys, three guys from the community, and everything is looted and destroyed, and you have a lot of inscription in Arabic. So I cannot translate them, but we'll use the pictures we have to translate. But some of them, they are praising Jolani . They call him Jolani, and not al-Sharaa. Some of them, they are some nowadays they write also, SOS, for some reason. And they write some they write that they come from Dara that come to punish the Druze and whatever.

From there, one of the fighters who were guarding the place, he told us, come with me. I want to show you something that you should document. So we arrive to a yard building that is a bit, very close to the roundabout. And there's a kind of fence around a small garden on the first floor of a building, a high building, in a big building, like five or six floors.

And we enter, and already, before we enter, because it's a fence we see behind, and we see what we discovered. There is just, you cannot imagine it. It's like there's a burnt body in a chair, metallic chair next to him there is blue plastic melted. And part of this from some two garden chairs, chairs for outside. And his left arm is full of this burnt plastic, melted plastic. The rest of the body is almost burnt. And only his legs, they are still not totally burnt. And one on his right feet, foot, there is a, what they call here “Shahata”, like a sandal. There is something to clean the floor next to it. And the fighters, they told us he was probably just cleaning his small yard when they came. And one of the most. I mean, not the most. But what is also very horrible on this scene is that you see this tortured, burnt body, where you can still see the shape of the face. And he has they put on his legs in front of him, his picture. So a picture that they took in his flat, we presume, and they put it on him, so he's sitting with this burnt with this picture of himself.

After this, we decided that it's enough, it's enough. And also, we had some moments of tension in the during the day, where people, they open fighters, they open fire in some buildings, because in many places, you have still isolated fighters from the Islamist groups who are hiding in flats. And sometimes they come out. Sometimes they come out and they try to kill everyone they meet on their way trying to escape the city. Or they just sit in the flat and they wait for something.

We had also witnessed testimonies that some of them that were caught and totally drugged. So they were fighting, and we were, yeah, we were basically scared, because all this happened like hours ago, and there are still guys, Islamist, like hiding in some places. So we went back.It was very hard to find a car back, but we find, finally, someone who is from the village we are in and brought us back.

So this is the testimony of a very small part of what we discovered, because there are dozens of villages that are were occupied and attacked, dozens, there are 100,000 people like fleeing to the South. And of course, we don't deny that there were probably some crimes against the Bedouin. It is. It's possible. No, it's possible. It's totally possible. We'll never deny this. But there were no, there were no there were no intent, in purpose to go and massacre people.

If this happened, it happened from some very marginal individuals or small groups. It has nothing to do with the factions. It's all what we saw, all what we witnessed shows that it's not the fact after we didn't see everything, we didn't see the Bedouin communities, the Bedouin villages. So we cannot say, but you have something like Southern refugees from the Bedouins in Daraa. They left to Daraa. So they left from the place the Islamists were coming from.

There is no refugees from the from the Druze in Daraa, very few, very few. They made, Syrian TV, made one TV interview with a couple. They found one couple who left from this road to Daraa, and it's very representative of the the of the whole situation. Because no one is going to Daraa, even us. We want to try to find a way to get away, but we cannot go to Daraa. It's a dangerous area. The General Security and the Islamic group, they are roaming around the whole region. There is not any guarantee of security if we pass on the other side, and there is no guarantee of security inside, because we don't know how much the regime will let this Islamist group that gathered all around enter at some point, because they cannot stop them, or because they want them to enter as they did before.

I just wanted to share this testimony. I'm angry, I'm sad, I'm disgusted. I have still the smell of the dead in my head, in my in my nose, our clothes were smelling the dead. We had to take shower and to put the clothes away because they were smelling in the house where we came back too.

We don't know how, how the people were will survive after this. Now we understand even better what happened on the coast and how the people can feel there, like Syria cannot rebuild itself, based on this, mass murders and denial of crimes and and division. And, I mean, Sowayda was a very cute community. Somehow, it was very nice to be in Sowayda. You feel very safe in many aspects, and also gratefully to this self-defense factions who are protecting people. Of course, there were crimes like everywhere, everywhere else and bad people and full (ed. Unsure) like this, remnants of the former regime. Of course, they are everywhere. They are everywhere and also here, it's not specific to here. It's not specific to the region that are targeted by the Islamists.

So please do whatever you can, put the maximum pressure on Jordan so they open the corridor in the South so that people can just flee until all this is ruled. Push your own governments who have been normalising with a- Sharaa for months now, Germany, France, America, all of them, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, they were all normalising Italy, all normalizing with

Jabhat al-Nusra and HTS and Al Sharaa. So this gave him the white flag to do this, and we have to do something to stop this shit. So I stopped here because it's very long.

Please help me to share this. Please use it as you want.