One of three Red Crescent volunteer medics injured when their ambulance was shot repeatedly by Syrian security forces in the central city of Homs died on Thursday of his wounds.

Hakam Draak al-Sibai died in Lebanon’s American University Hospital from gunshot wounds sustained on September 7 when the Red Crescent ambulance he was transporting a wounded man in came under fire in Homs’ Abu Hol street.

In a report on the attack, a leaked Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) document said the gunfire came from either “security or the army” and said 31 bullets had been fired at the ambulance from four sides as it transported a man who had been wounded in his arm in an earlier attack.

Photos of the ambulance show it peppered with bullet holes along its sides, rear and roof as well as through its front windscreen and blood stains are seen on the passenger seat and on the floor of the vehicle.

The two other volunteers in the ambulance at the time, Muhammad Hakam Mubarak and Abdel Hameed al-Fajr were also injured, as was the patient.
GlobalPost first reported in May on the systematic attempt by Syrian security forces to prevent injured protestors receiving medical care and the dangers faced by medics attempting to treat them.

Read GlobalPost: Syrian protesters denied medical care

According to activists Ali Farzat, whose work is strongly critical of the government, was forced out of his car in Damascus, badly beaten and dumped at the side of the road, BBC writes.

“In one of his latest cartoons, Ali Farzat shows President Assad sweatily clutching a suitcase while he tries to hitch a lift with the Libyan leader, Col Gaddafi, who is furiously driving a getaway car.

The Syrian cartoonist has produced a stream of images like this in the past few months that have directly attacked the Syrian leader.

In one, President Assad is shown patiently white-washing the shadow of a huge security thug on a wall, while the real man stands untouched. The caption reads: "Lifting the emergency law".

Another shows Mr Assad flexing in uniform in front of a mirror that reflects back a dominant, muscular image, overshadowing his puny figure.

For 40 years, Ali Farzat has been skewering the mismatch between rhetoric and reality in the Arab world.

In his meticulous drawings, mostly without captions, he has shown the overbearing brutality of bureaucracy, the hypocrisy of leaders, and myriad other injustices of daily life that have resonated across the Middle East.