Lo / AFP - Getty Images

Soldiers from the Free Syrian Army (FSA) detain alleged "shabiha" members identified as Mehsin Mohamed Ahmed and Mohamed Azezz, from Aleppo, and accuse them of stealing from homes and giving important information to the Syrian regime, in an undisclosed location in the north of Idlib province on June 19, 2012.

NORTHERN SYRIA – Every war has its demons. The chaos of bullets and bombs gives rise to a certain breed of men who join the fight for the thrill of killing, and to stand before begging prisoners and cowering women in damp tattered clothing. 

In Syria these monsters in civilian clothing who are the enforcers for President Bashar Assad’s regime are called the “shabiha.”

I’m staying in one of their family’s homes.

Syria’s ghost-like devils
It’s a small house with a vaulted stone ceiling. The shower is a bucket on the floor that slopes into a drain. There’s an outhouse in the garden with a fig tree.  The house looks like many in this rural village flanked by olive, walnut and almond groves.  

Syrian troops withdraw from 'secondary towns' and pound Aleppo

The shabiha left this village when the army pulled out to re-group and attack Aleppo, Syria’s commercial capital and the focus of the battle to control the north of the country. Before they left, there were about 50 shabiha in the village by most rebel counts.  

Some lived among the rebels as spies. Others operated as plainclothes commandoes, arresting rebels or just shooting them and their families. I’ve seen a video of shabiha using a chainsaw to cut off a rebel’s head.  I saw a shabiha prisoner tied up with wires. The rebels accused him of raping 10 girls. The youngest girl was said to be just 14.  

Shabiha is a difficult word to translate into English. It comes from the word Syrians used to describe the luxury Mercedes favored by the Assad family’s operatives that the enforcers of the regime used to move money, smuggle weapons and intimidate opponents.

Whenever someone in a flashy Mercedes with tinted window passed by, Syrians would say the car was a ‘shabah.’  It literally means the car was a ‘ghost,’ mysterious and not to be trifled with. The thugs who drove these phantom cars became known as shabiha – the ghosts who worked in the dictatorship’s deep shadows.  

After the fighting started here the Assad government turned the shabiha into a militia. It armed them and sent them to infiltrate, execute and spy on the rebels. Now the shabiha are more feared than Syrian troops. Their evil has become legendary.  

Rebels talk of the shabiha like devils, deadly as the regime’s chemical gas.  But herein lies the danger. 

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Slideshow: Syria uprising

Stringer / Reuters

After months of protests and violent crackdowns, a look back at the violence that has overtaken the country.

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Who is really who?
I’m not sure if this house was really owned by any shabiha or their relatives. The owner’s son is accused of being shabiha, but the rebels have no solid proof that he did anything wrong at all. And there’s no proof either that the young man I saw tied up with wires, his eyes covered with a bandana, actually raped any girls.  

Every war has revolutionary justice. Here that justice is carried out in the name of fighting shabiha.  

No one knows exactly how many shabiha work for the regime. If the Assad government falls, the rebels will likely – almost certainly – carry out executions of suspected shabiha.  

A man I spoke to this morning said all shabiha should be executed without mercy, and their property sold and distributed among their victims. The man’s own cousin is among those accused of being shabiha.

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Slippery slope 
But how will Syrians know when justice is being served or miscarried?  

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Machine guns operated by motorcycle brakes? Get a glimpse at the rebels fighting against Assad's forces in Syria's mountainous Jabal al-Zawiya area.

Launch slideshow

There’s also a disproportionate number of Alawites, accused of being shabiha. The Alawites are the minority Shiite Muslim sect to which Assad belongs and which has held a disproportionate amount of power since his family came to power in 1970. But the Alawites make up only 10 percent of the population, sowing resentment among the country’s Sunni population, who make up the majority of Syria’s 22 million people. 

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Syrians need to prepare for the aftermath if the Assad regime falls. Atrocities that could be considered war crimes have been committed in this country and Syrians should rightly demand that the perpetrators be held accountable.  

But Syrians must be careful not to engage in a murderous campaign of hunting ghosts. The shabiha are real, but they can’t be everywhere.

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Children were slaughtered, tortured, sexually attacked and used as human shields by pro-government Syrian forces, according to a damning United Nations report released late on Monday. 

"Children were victims of killing and maiming, arbitrary arrest, detention, torture and ill-treatment, including sexual violence, by the Syrian Armed Forces, the intelligence forces, and the Shabbiha militia," the U.N.'s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict Radhika Coomaraswamy said in a release issued along with the report. 

Shaam News Network / AFP - Getty Images

Residents of Houla ride in the back of a pick-up truck on June 5, according to Syrian opposition's Shaam News Network. In May, a massacre in Houla claimed 108 lives including those of 49 children, according to UN figures.

The shabiha are a pro-government militia that recruits largely from the Alawite community- the same Muslim sect as President Bashar Assad. Sunnis, who make up the majority of the rebels, are an estimated 74 percent of the population.

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In an interview with the BBC, Coomaraswamy said she had learned of "horrific" reports in Syria. She told the BBC:

"We are really quite shocked. Killing and maiming of children in cross-fire is something we come across in many conflicts but this torture of children in detention, children as young as 10, is something quite extraordinary, which we don't really see in other places."

....

"We also had testimonies and saw children who had been tortured, and who carried the torture marks with them. We also heard of children being used -- this was recounted to us by some children -- of being put on tanks and being used as human shields so that the tanks would not be fired upon."

Coomaraswamy also criticized the rebellion's main armed group for its treatment of children.

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"For the first time we heard of children being recruited by the Free Syrian Army mainly in medical and service orientated jobs but still on the front line," she told the BBC.

The U.N. says Syrian forces have killed more than 10,000 people in the crackdown on an uprising inspired by revolts which toppled four Arab leaders in 2011. Syrian authorities say foreign-backed militants have killed 2,600 soldiers and police. 

Activists say Syria's army and pro-Assad militia have committed two massacres in the last two weeks, in the Houla region and a farming hamlet called Mazraat al-Qubeir. Syrian authorities blamed the killings on "terrorists."

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The United States and other Western nations who have been critical of Assad's regime had little new to suggest to end Syria's 15-month long crisis, which has seen the United Nations Security Council deadlocked amid continued support for Assad by veto-holding Russia and China.

The use of civilians as human shields has been reported before.  On March 25, Human Rights Watch released a video purportedly showing how Syrians were forced to walk in front of armored personnel carriers: 

The international rights organization also quoted a resident of Kafr Nabl as saying:

"They took maybe 25 people, including me. There were also eight children, aged from 10 to 15, among us. They made us march in front and around the military vehicles to some houses where they were searching for wanted opposition activists. We marched for about 600 meters. They were insulting us the whole time. They arrested several people from the houses. Then they made us march back to their base, after which they released all of us, apart from the detained activists. The whole operation lasted for about two hours."

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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