Correction
Madam,
I am the author of a book, No Turning Back. Life, Loss, And Hope in Wartime Syria, reviewed in your pages last week. I am writing because your reviewer has misrepresented my work. He raises questions about my credibility based on what he calls the “seemingly deliberate fudging of death figures of a massacre that took place in Alawite villages, when a coalition of close to half a dozen militant groups launched pre-dawn raid.”
He clearly missed the parts of my book where I quote the same Human Rights Watch figure - 190 dead - that he claims I ignore. From No Turning Back:
“Syrian state media reported mass graves in two of the eleven Alawite villages but didn’t specify the number of dead, beyond stating there were dozens. On October 10, Human Rights Watch put the figure at 190 killed, most on August 4, including at least fifty-seven women, eighteen children, and fourteen elderly men, in “incidents that amount to war crimes.”
“I was there,” an Islamist foreign fighter I have known for years told me later. “There were people there who said, ‘Come and see what Daesh [the Arabic acronym for ISIS] has done.’ I walked into a room, a small room. It was full of men they had killed. They were fighting-age men, I wasn’t sad for them, it’s war. But when they showed us another house, my hair—not just on the back of my neck, but on my head—stood up. I was embarrassed to consider myself a human, and [realize] that other humans could do that. They had gathered women and girls in this room, from the ages of what looked like six or seven to the elderly. It was odd. There were only very young or old, there weren’t any young women. They’d killed them all, and piled them on top of each other. There is no religion, no morals, no ideology that could accept that. That’s what Daesh did, and in the name of Islam. It made me sick.”
Mohammad said that Suqoor el Ezz, which headed the offensive’s operations room along with ISIS, had been tasked with kidnapping the Alawite women and children. “I saw some being detained and I saw others killed,” he said. He was unapologetic about the killings, describing them as “one crime against hundreds of thousands of crimes committed by the regime.” The Alawites, he said, “are happy that Bashar is killing us, so they needed to feel something, to feel that their stance, if not with Bashar, but not against him, was part of the crime. They had to be made to feel that. We didn’t lose anything,” he said after the regime regained the villages. “We killed everything in them, took everything from them, burned everything in them. We gave them a taste of what we experience.”
Your reviewer dishonestly claims I skimmed over the toll of this massacre and its grisly truth, and he spends paragraphs asking whether the rest of my book should be believed based on his misreading of my work. A person can disagree with another, or dislike another’s work but he or she cannot misrepresent it. That is ethically wrong.
Rania Abouzeid,
Via email.
Blessing for expats
Madam,
I was perturbed to read some reports on social media saying the Punjab Overseas Pakistanis Commission (POPC) office had been closed for some days. The POPC was very helpful for me a year ago.
I left Lahore to live in the United Kingdom and rented my old home to a family. A few weeks after I settled in the UK, I found out that the people renting my house were refusing to pay rent. When I called them, they threatened me and instead of agreeing to move out or pay what they owed, they attempted to extort money from me.
I contacted the POPC on the recommendation of a friend. They took note of my complaint and successfully removed the family from my home and obtained the money owed to me. The Overseas Pakistanis Commission (OPC) was a blessing for Pakistanis living abroad.
It should be noted that the POPC was a pet-project of the senior leadership of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) for the past five years. Therefore, considering the political rivalry between the PML-N and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), it is possible that the closure of the POPC office is politically motivated. I sincerely hope that the new government will not indulge in such unproductive actions and that the POPC office will re-open immediately.
Anser Mahmood,
London.
Delivery outside a hospital
Madam,
A woman gave birth to a child on the ground after medical staff allegedly refused to admit her to Kot Addu hospital. Her relatives said that they brought the patient to the medical facility after she went into labour. However, instead of admitting her, the staff and doctors asked her to leave. “She was suffering from labour pains but the hospital staff refused to admit her,” they said. “We had no other option but to lay her on the hospital ground where she gave birth to a baby,” said the woman’s relatives.
The woman’s husband Abdul Sattar, a resident of Laal Garh, said that he brought his pregnant wife Haseena Bibi for delivery to the hospital and could not get her admitted due to the unavailability of an emergency entrance token, leaving Haseena Bibi to lie on the ground from 3pm to 6pm in excruciation pain. The Punjab government should conduct an inquiry into the matter.
Abdullah Haider,
Multan.
Load shedding in Karachi
Madam,
There was a time when load shedding was not common and many people in our country did not even know what it meant. Even today, people from some countries abroad need to be explained this phenomenon which seems to be only prevalent in Pakistan.
For years, the public has resigned itself to living in a country where the electricity outages occur according to a timetable. We plan our lives and our schedules around these outages, and have grown so used to them that we don’t even complain if they last more than an hour.
In certain areas, the electricity is gone for hours on end. In a time when temperatures are reaching unprecedented levels, and a record number of people are dying due to heat strokes, it is imperative that they be provided with at least the ability to turn on their ceiling fan in times of great heat.
Over the past few weeks, many residents of Karachi have had an especially hard time, with instances of load shedding rising tenfold. I implore the authorities to curb this increasing load shedding at once. The people of Karachi have had enough.
Bilal Khan,
Karachi.