A Syrian opposition demonstrator speaks from the city of Hama, where it was reported that troops opened fire on protesters
In Hama today we knew that the regime is lying and cheating the world, but we wanted to show this to the whole of the world. We wanted to put him in test. We tried to reach again to our main square, al-Asi square. There were lots of checkpoints and even reinforcements on these checkpoints. In spite of all of that, all of the protesters tried to gather. So troops opened fire on us. One of my colleagues was killed and we don’t know the exact number of the wounded. Here on the ground there isn’t any ceasefire from the regime. There is a kind of slowdown. They are just slowing the number of people they usually kill. We will not stop protesting anyway. We are being killed every day and we are demonstrating every day. We will keep demonstrating even if Bashar al-Assad kills the whole of the Syrian people.
I don’t know why the international community are still watching us being killed every day without doing anything. Here in Syria we don’t like Nato so much, but if our president and his regime are killing us why not Nato? We are just being killed without saying anything. Now if someone is coming to kill you and someone will offer you help, of course you will accept his help even if you don’t like him so much. So we want military intervention from Turkey, from the Arab League and even Nato assistance, OK, just to stop the killing.
We had a very miserable experience with Arab monitors in Syria. They came just to watch us being killed. When Arab monitors were in Syria the number of people being killed increased. And we feel that the same will happen now. We don’t want monitors. We don’t want people to come and watch how we are being killed. We want people to come and stop the killing and defend us.