Freed journalist 'ducks for cover' at sound of planes Quirico says US intervention in Syria would be 'serious error' 
 
 (ANSA) - Rome, September 10 - After 152 days in often-brutal captivity, veteran war correspondent Domenico Quirico, who returned to Italy on Monday, said he instinctively "ducked for cover" at the sound of airplanes overhead when he woke up in his own bed on Tuesday."Only after a few moments did I realize I was not in Syria, I was home. It was a beautiful sensation," he said in an interview with television network Sky TG24.Quirico, a long-time journalist for La Stampa daily, celebrated his first day of freedom Monday after five months of captivity in Syria along with Belgian academic Pierre Piccinin.The 61-year-old reporter, who returned five kilos lighter but in good health, said that his captors did not treat him well."I was scared. The revolution betrayed me," he said."Maybe this sounds too moralistic, but truly, in Syria I met the country of Evil," he said. Quirico warned against United States intervention in Syria."The Americans have made many errors over the last years.But to carry out an action like this would only strengthen jihadist forces...it would be a serious error."Our captors were happy at the idea of an American bombardment," he said.Quirico said that he believed they had originally been captured and sold by the Syrian Free Army."We were beaten daily and - I am duty-bound to say this - were only treated well by an al-Qaeda group."They were 152 days of imprisonment, small dark rooms where we were fighting against time, fear, humiliation, hunger, lack of pity, two mock executions, two failed escape attempts, the silence of God, family, of others, of life. I was a hostage in Syria, betrayed by the revolution that no longer exists and has become fanaticism and the work of bandits" he said.Of the many events that took place during his six months as a hostage, he said he was "very intrigued" by Premier Enrico Letta's recently forged left-right government."I was received by Premier Letta and I never would have imagined that (PdL Secretary Angelino) Alfano would be standing next to him...but this too is politics," he said.A government based on a precarious alliance between traditional foes - Letta's own centre-left Democratic Party (PD) and ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right People of Freedom (PdL) party - was forged in April to break a stalemate that left Italy without a government for two months. 

 The Italian war correspondent Domenico Quirico, who reported sympathetically on the uprising in Syria before being taken hostage in April by rebel fighters, told reporters on Monday after his release that two years of bloody, armed conflict had changed the nature of the rebellion. “I was a hostage in Syria, betrayed by the revolution that no longer exists and has become fanaticism and the work of bandits,” he said. 
 
 Mr. Quirico, a veteran reporter, added, “It is not the revolution that I encountered two years ago in Aleppo — secular, tolerant. It has become something else,” in remarks published by his newspaper, the Turin daily La Stampa. 
 
 La Stampa also published video of Mr. Quirico’s emotional return to his newsroom and an English translation of his statement taking issue with part of an account given by a fellow captive, the Belgian academic Pierre Piccinin. As the Belgian newspaper Le Soir reported, Mr. Piccinin said in a television interview on Monday, after he too returned home, that “it was not the government of Bashar al-Assad that used sarin or some other gas during combat in the Damascus suburbs” last month. 
 
 According to Mr. Piccinin — who described himself as a previously “fierce supporter of the Free Syrian Army in their just struggle for democracy” — at one stage during their captivity, he and Mr. Quirico overheard rebels saying that the deadly gas attacks last month had been carried out by anti-Assad forces to frame the government and provoke intervention. 
 
 Mr. Quirico confirmed the incident but disagreed sharply with Mr. Piccinin on what it meant. “We heard some people we didn’t know talking through a half-closed door,” he said. “It’s impossible to know whether what was said was based on real fact or just hearsay.” 
 
 According to La Stampa, Mr. Quirico called it “madness” to say that the overheard conversation was definitive proof of a rebel plot.
– An Italian war reporter held hostage for five months by rebel forces in Syria has written a damning denunciation of the anti-Assad movement. "It is not the revolution that I encountered two years ago in Aleppo—secular, tolerant. It has become something else," Domenico Quirico wrote in his newspaper La Stampa, per the New York Times. "Our captors were from a group that professed itself to be Islamist but that in reality is made up of mixed-up young men who have joined the revolution because the revolution now belongs to these groups that are midway between banditry and fanaticism," he wrote, per the BBC. "They follow whoever promises them a future, gives them weapons, gives them money to buy cell phones, computers, clothes." More controversially, Quirico's fellow captive, Belgian academic Pierre Piccinin, has accused the rebels—of whom he says he was previously a "fierce supporter"—of framing Bashar al-Assad with last month's chemical weapons attacks, after overhearing their captors say as much on a Skype conversation with other rebels. But Quirico is less certain. "We heard some people we didn’t know talking through a half-closed door," he says, per the Times. "It’s impossible to know whether what was said was based on real fact or just hearsay." Nevertheless, he says, he does not support a US military strike against Syria, which he says would only strengthen extremist forces, reports ANSA. "Our captors were happy at the idea of an American bombardment," he says.