Getting to Houla, the site of the massacre, from Rastan, barely 30 kilometers (20 miles) away, takes us three days and three different vehicles. Taldou, the part of the city where the massacre occurred, is located in a valley, surrounded by the higher elevation Alawite villages from which the murderers approached on the afternoon of May 25. "They keep an eye on all the roads into Taldou," an elderly farmer explained during one of our many hours of waiting. "You have to travel in vehicles they're familiar with. Otherwise they'll come down, block the road, and you're dead."
So we waited until a milk truck came, waited until a second familiar vehicle was available, then traveled in slow motion toward Taldou. But the route we took proved to be an important clue in the question of who perpetrated the massacre, rebels or soldiers.
What we saw was that it would hardly have been possible for 700 rebels to have traveled here unnoticed from Rastan, kill people in Taldou and then disappear again without a trace. This, however, is the story that the regime is spreading in various creative ways. There's the Jacobite nun from a convent near Homs, for example, who is traveling the world as a supposedly neutral PR spokesperson for the regime and spreading the myths that there is CIA conspiracy against Syria and that many thousands of foreign al-Qaida fighters are in the country. Then there are the two supposed eyewitnesses from Taldou that the regime presented to willing journalists in Damascus, political tourists and the United Nations employees trying to reconstruct the course of events of the massacre.
When we were in Taldou for two days in mid-July, it was under bombardment from army artillery. The houses were in the line of fire of snipers at a military post outside the town -- just as they were at the time of the massacre, which also included houses near the post. The testimony of eyewitnesses and survivors suggests the same conclusion that the UN's report reached: It was the army, not the rebels, who perpetrated the massacre.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/gaining-a-clearer-view-of-the-increasing-barbarity-in-syrian-civil-war-a-874027-2.html