Abu Ahmad weeps with the knowledge of the crackdown taking place in Hama, Syria, and dreads the memory of a brutal massacre committed by the Syrian regime a generation earlier in his home town, dpa reported.
"I am very worried about my family in Hama. I have not talked to them in four days, and I cannot reach anyone. I do not know if they are dead or alive," Abu Ahmad, a native of Hama, told the German News Agency dpa, tears rolling down his cheeks as he sat on a bench inside a Beirut garden.
Some 100 people have died since Sunday in Hama as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's security forces try to quell protests calling for the ouster of his Baathist regime.
Like many residents in Hama, the latest violence has torn open a 29-year-old scar in Ahmad's heart. In 1982, Syrian forces under the orders of then-president Hafez al-Assad, father of Bashar, crushed a rebellion by the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood against the ruling Alawite minority.
The Alawites have dominated politics in Syria, where the majority of the population is Sunni, since the Baath Party took power in a 1963 coup.
"Some 20,000 people were killed in the month-long battle in 1982, which Hafez al-Assad carried out against the people of Hama," the 67-year-old Ahmad said.
"The regime managed to hide their massacre then, but today they cannot because the technology has helped our children to make their voices be heard across the world. Hama has proven to be the mother of the uprising in Syria against these tyrants, the Assad family."
Hama, 200 kilometres north of the capital Damascus, has been the scene of the biggest protests since the uprising began in mid-March.