CNN profiles Syrian cartoonist Ali Ferzat, whose hands were beaten by Syrian leader al-Assad loyalists. The CNN story offers a few details I haven’t seen before. Early reports suggested that three men stopped at the side of the road to offer assistance to Ali after he was beaten close to death. But the CNN report suggests that only because the truck carrying the three men had a flat tire near Ali, that he was able to convince them to get him somewhere safer – but they wouldn’t take him to the hospital.
He thought he surely would bleed to death there. Cars wouldn’t stop, perhaps afraid to pick up a person targeted by the regime or by police. But then the first of three miracles happened: A truck’s tire burst, forcing it to stop exactly in front of Ferzat.
“This is like something out of a freakin’ movie,” Amir Ahmad Nasr, a blogger-author friend who was translating the conversation from Arabic, said to me.
Ferzat threw himself into the bed of the pickup and begged the three men who drove it to take him back to the city. They agreed to drop him at the gates of Damascus, but wouldn’t take him further – definitely not to a hospital – for fear of being targeted themselves. Still bleeding and barely able to see because of the beatings to his head, Ferzat wandered up to a house and asked its guard for help
Continue to read over at CNN for the other two miracles.