Syria: Assassinations hit a doctor and witness to the killing of revolutionary icon Hamza Khatib

Omar Al-Hourani-Daraa

As usual he goes to his clinic in the evening, he did not see anything remarkable, and when he opened the clinic door, the explosion occurred.

These were the last moments of the life of Dr. Mamoun Muhammad Al-Hariri from Busr Al-Harir in the eastern countryside of Daraa, south of Syria, who died yesterday Sunday after an explosive device that hit him directly in the head and chest, and was ready to explode when the door was opened.

Targeting opposition activists
News from southern Syria is reported of repeated assassinations, but this time the news was harsh for Abdel-Mawla Al-Hariri, a close friend and a safe friend, and he was a companion to him throughout the revolution years, before they separated, where Abdel Mawla migrated to Turkey while Dr. Mamoun stayed in Daraa.

Abdel-Mawla says to Al-Jazeera Net that the regime's policy since its control of southern Syria in the middle of last year is to arrest and liquidate opposition activists who did not leave their towns after the settlement process, noting that the regime killed three prominent activists in his town.

Speaking of Doctor Mamoun, he said that he used to see patients almost free of charge, and he had a social position added to his humanitarian work during the years of the revolution, where he was content to live far from his family of his wife and six children, to work as a paramedic in most of the southern areas that were being bombed the system.

Mamoun had lost his brother Hassan, who was also a doctor, as he and all his family were killed in the bombing of the regime forces, according to Al-Hariri, who added that Mamoun did not change his position towards the regime even after he took control of his town, which prompted the regime to get rid of him.

Repeated cases
Since the settlement process took place in southern Syria last July, the Martyrs Documentation Office in Daraa counted 331 assassinations, during which 198 people were killed throughout the Daraa Governorate, including Ibrahim Al-Jahmani in Daraa Al-Balad, who was a witness to the killing of the icon of the Syrian revolution, the child Hamza Khatib.

His uncle Ayman Al-Jahmani said in an interview with Al-Jazeera Net that at the beginning of the Syrian revolution, Ibrahim, like most youth in the Daraa Al-Balad region, was arrested by the Air Force Intelligence in Daraa, and then he was deposited with the Investigation Branch of the Air Force Intelligence and its headquarters in Sumaria in Damascus.

And it was coincidental that the two children, Hamza Al-Khatib and Thamer Al-Sharia, should be arrested and brought to the same branch. In it, Ibrahim witnessed the torture of the two children over 45 days and then killed them, as he was in the room closest to the children's room.

After he was released and during his treatment in Jordan, Ibrahim testified about the torture of Al-Khatib and the Sharia to the media, so that the security branches began pursuing him with the aim of arresting him again.

Ibrahim had previously been subjected to an assassination attempt, after which his older brother, Eyas, was killed. The regime also arrested his mother and two sisters, Ayat and Rita, in early August 2013, but the detention did not last long, as in the same month the mother and her daughters were executed.

Al-Jahmani adds that on the morning of Friday, January 3, Ibrahim woke up as usual and with the same enthusiasm, but he did not know that this would be his last wake-up.

He wore his clothes and left his home heading to the mosque, and it is only minutes, and if a motorbike has two people standing on it, one of them, the most famous of whom was his machine gun 15 times, settled in Ibrahim's body to announce his death.

Al-Jahmani notes that the security services affiliated with the regime and through whom he named their mercenaries, whom they recruited from the people of the country, were the ones who killed the important witness in the case.