..., a few thousand Syrian troops using armor, artillery, and bulldozers leveled the city. First they bombed all the roads so no one could escape by vehicle. Then they shelled the city. They did not risk going in house to house to determine who was an insurgent and who was not. It was far safer and quicker to shell everyone from afar, let Allah sort it out.
Then, to make sure everyone was dead, they went from district to district, robbing, raping, and killing everyone in sight even going into mosques, shooting everyone and then setting the mosques on fire.
There were claims made that the Syrian military pumped lethal hydrogen cyanide gas into buildings where insurgents were said to be hiding.
Bulldozers were brought in to rake over the rubble to make sure all were dead. Instead of going through the debris to look for survivors, most of the city was turned into a parking lot.
During the three weeks of slaughter, it was estimated that as many as 40,000 Sunni Muslim insurgents and civilians lay dead; Assad's brother Rifaat, who commanded the assault, boasted of killing 38,000 people. The attack has been described as possibly being "the single deadliest act by any Arab government against its own people in the modern Middle East."
