Humping Hama

Nada Bakri has an article in The New York Times about Syria:

Syrian security forces conducted house-to-house raids in the central city of Hama, hunting for activists involved in the country’s uprising, residents and activists said. Several tanks and military buses were parked on the eastern side of the city, they said, while hundreds of soldiers searched two neighborhoods, al-Qusour and al-Hamidiya, asking by name for people involved in, or suspected of playing a role in, planning the uprising. It was not clear how many were detained. With foreign journalists barred from the country and the official Syrian news media hewing to the government’s line, activists constitute a crucial funnel for information.
“We are hearing gunfire every now and then, and we heard they have long lists of wanted people,” said one Hama activist, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “We don’t know what more they want from us.”
The two neighborhoods had been very active in protests against the government of President Bashar al-Assad until troops raided the city on 31 July, holding it by force for ten days. Activists said the death toll was more than a hundred civilians on that day alone, a painful reminder of a massacre under Assad’s father, Hafez, in 1982. Intending to crush an uprising then, he leveled the city, killing at least ten thousand.
In recent days, as the downfall of Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya bolstered the spirits of government opponents across Syria, activists reported a surge of protests in Hama. Fears for the thousands of people the Syrian forces have detained in the months of protest have grown. A report published this week by a Western human rights group said that the Syrian government might have committed crimes against humanity in its handling of detainees. The group, Amnesty International, said there was enough evidence to conclude that torture or ill-treatment caused or contributed to the deaths of at least 52 of the 88 people who died while in detention since April, ten of them under the age of eighteen; at least one was thirteen. The victims, all male, were arrested because of their involvement or suspected involvement in the protests against Assad’s rule. The group said that independent forensic pathologists who reviewed a number of cases concluded by the type of injuries on the victim’s corpses that they may have suffered beatings, burns, blunt-force injuries, and whipping marks and slashes.
“Taken in the context of the widespread and systematic violations taking place in Syria, we believe that these deaths in custody may include crimes against humanity,” said Neil Sammonds, the Amnesty International researcher on Syria. The report was drawn from accounts by Syrians who fled to Lebanon and Turkey, and those communicating by telephone and email from within the country, including relatives of the dead, medical professionals, released detainees, and activists.
Most of the cases highlighted by Amnesty International took place in Homs, in central Syria, and in Dara’a in the south. Both cities have had large protests against Assad’s government since mid-March, when the uprising started, and were repeatedly attacked and put under siege for several days by armed troops. “The accounts of torture we have received are horrific,” Sammonds said. “We believe the Syrian government to be systematically persecuting its own people on a vast scale.”
The Obama administration added to the economic pressure on Assad’s government by freezing the assets in the United States of Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem and two other officials.

Rico says the Syrians might have committed crimes against humanity? Who are we kidding?