Assault in Border Town Sends Syrians Into Lebanon

Backed by dozens of tanks, Syrian troops entered the town of Tall Kalakh before dawn, following the pattern of raids on other cities like Dara’a, Baniyas and Homs. The assault came a day after another Friday of protests and an announcement by the Syrian government that a national dialogue would begin next week.

Even though the death toll in the protests on Friday paled compared with past weeks, the assault seemed to show that the government would persist with a crackdown that has led to the deaths of hundreds and the detention of thousands in one of the most brutal campaigns of repression since the so-called Arab Spring began. The uprising has represented the most serious challenge to the four decades of rule by the Assad family, though Syrian officials have maintained that they have the upper hand.

“People in the town were expecting a big military operation,” said a human rights advocate in Damascus, who was in contact with people in Tall Kalakh, a town about 25 miles from the Lebanese border. “This morning, they saw army troops with dozens of tanks moving around their town.”

Fayaz Abdallah, a local official from the Lebanese village of Awadeh, across from Tall Kalakh, said that at least 600 Syrian families had fled to Lebanon since Saturday morning. He said that most of them were women and children. In all, Lebanese border officials say, at least 5,000 families have fled Syria since the beginning of the uprising in mid-March, when protests in the southern town of Dara’a over the arrests of youths set off nationwide demonstrations.

A local Lebanese official who gave his name as Amer said that among those who crossed the border Saturday were four wounded people, two men and two women. One of the men died later of his wounds in a Lebanese hospital, he said.

By nightfall, residents said, the town, along a landscape of rounded hills, remained tense. At least three people were killed in the assault, all by sniper fire, said Wissam Tarif, executive director of Insan, a Syrian human rights group.

Mohamad Fawzi, a 24-year-old Awadeh resident, said that gunfire in Syria could be heard for hours on the Lebanese side of the border.

Since last month, the Syrian military, often at the vanguard of security forces and plainclothes paramilitary men known as shabeeha, has methodically marched across the country in an attempt to suppress the uprising by force. Dara’a was first, then Baniyas, on the Mediterranean coast, a week ago. Adnan Mahmoud, the Syrian information minister, said Friday that troops had pulled back from both those towns, though residents said a military presence remained. He declared both towns, and their hinterlands, quiet.

The assault on Tall Kalakh may have been spurred by a protest Friday by hundreds of professionals who have recently resigned from the governing Baath Party. In their protest, a show of dissent unheard of just months ago, residents said many of them chanted slogans calling for the fall of the government.

“For a week, we’ve been hearing that the government will send the army to punish us because we have been organizing big demonstrations against the Baath Party and President Assad,” said a Tall Kalakh resident who was reached by phone.

In past assaults, the military raid has been followed by waves of arrests, in which intelligence is gathered, and then more detentions are carried out.

Friday’s protests were, at least anecdotally, smaller than past weeks, though still remarkable in that they came in the face of the withering crackdown. Even in Homs, where the military deployed tanks last week, at least five small protests were reported.

Human rights activists said three people were killed Friday in Homs, Syria’s third-largest city, and three others in protests elsewhere in the country.

Human rights activists say that at least 775 people have been killed since the beginning of the uprising. The government, which has portrayed the unrest as an armed rebellion led by militant Islamists and provocateurs, has said 98 soldiers and 22 police officers have been killed.

American officials acknowledge that at least some protesters, though a small minority, have resorted to arms.

 

CBS Reporter Recounts a ‘Merciless’ Assault

Ms. Logan, a CBS News correspondent, was in the square preparing a report for “60 Minutes” on Feb. 11 when the celebratory mood suddenly turned threatening. She was ripped away from her producer and bodyguard by a group of men who tore at her clothes and groped and beat her body. “For an extended period of time, they raped me with their hands,” Ms. Logan said in an interview with The New York Times. She estimated that the attack involved 200 to 300 men.

Ms. Logan, who returned to work this month, is expected to speak at length about the assault on the CBS News program “60 Minutes” on Sunday night.

Her experience in Cairo underscored the fact that female journalists often face a different kind of violence. While other forms of physical violence affecting journalists are widely covered — the traumatic brain injury suffered by the ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff in Iraq in 2006 was a front-page story at that time — sexual threats against women are rarely talked about within journalistic circles or in the news media.

With sexual violence, “you only have your word,” Ms. Logan said in the interview. “The physical wounds heal. You don’t carry around the evidence the way you would if you had lost your leg or your arm in Afghanistan.”

Little research has been conducted about the prevalence of sexual violence affecting journalists in conflict zones. But in the weeks following Ms. Logan’s assault, other women recounted being harassed and assaulted while working overseas, and groups like the Committee to Project Journalists said they would revise their handbooks to better address sexual assault.

Jeff Fager, the chairman of CBS News and the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” said that the segment about the assault on Ms. Logan would raise awareness of the issue. “There’s a code of silence about it that I think is in Lara’s interest and in our interest to break,” he said.

Until now the only public comment about the assault came four days after it took place, when Ms. Logan was still in the hospital. She and Mr. Fager drafted a short statement that she had “suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating.”

That statement, Ms. Logan said, “didn’t leave me to carry the burden alone, like my dirty little secret, something that I had to be ashamed of.”

The assault happened the day that Ms. Logan returned to Cairo, having left a week earlier after being detained and interrogated by Egyptian forces. “The city was on fire with celebration” over Mr. Mubarak’s exit, she said, comparing it to a Super Bowl party. She and a camera crew traversed Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the celebrations, interviewing Egyptians and posing for photographs with people who wanted to be seen with an American journalist.

“There was a moment that everything went wrong,” she recalled.

As the cameraman, Richard Butler, was swapping out a battery, Egyptian colleagues who were accompanying the camera crew heard men nearby talking about wanting to take Ms. Logan’s pants off. She said: “Our local people with us said, ‘We’ve gotta get out of here.’ That was literally the moment the mob set on me.”

Mr. Butler, Ms. Logan’s producer, Max McClellan, and two locally hired drivers were “helpless,” Mr. Fager said, “because the mob was just so powerful.” A bodyguard who had been hired to accompany the team was able to stay with Ms. Logan for a brief period of time. “For Max to see the bodyguard come out of the pile without her, that was one of the worst parts,” Mr. Fager said. He said Ms. Logan “described how her hand was sore for days after — and the she realized it was from holding on so tight” to the bodyguard’s hand.

They estimated that they were separated from her for about 25 minutes.

“My clothes were torn to pieces,” Ms. Logan said.

She declined to go into more detail about the assault but said: “What really struck me was how merciless they were. They really enjoyed my pain and suffering. It incited them to more violence.”

After being rescued by a group of civilians and Egyptian soldiers, she was swiftly flown back to the United States. “She was quite traumatized, as you can imagine, for a period of time,” Mr. Fager said. Ms. Logan said she decided almost immediately that she would speak out about sexual violence both on behalf of other journalists and on behalf of “millions of voiceless women who are subjected to attacks like this and worse.”