320 bodies found in Syrian town

AP

The bodies of victims who activists said were killed by forces loyal to Syrias President Bashar Al-Assad, lie in a burial site in the town of Daraya. Activists said most of the victims were killed execution-style.

Syrian opposition activists accused President Bashar al-Assad’s army of massacring hundreds of people in a town close to the capital that government forces recaptured from rebels.

About 320 bodies, including women and children, were found in houses and basements in Daraya, south-west of Damascus, according to activists who said on Sunday most had been killed “execution-style” by troops.

Activists uploaded several videos on the internet showing rows of bloodied bodies wrapped in sheets. Most of the dead appeared to be young men, but at least one video showed several children who appeared to have been shot in the head. The body of one toddler was soaked in blood.

Clashes are raging across Syria as the 17-month-old rebellion grows increasingly bloody, particularly in the city of Aleppo, where the army and rebels appear stuck in a war of attrition.

Fighter jets dropped bombs and fired missiles yesterday on rebel-held districts in the south of the city.

Rebels say they control at least half the city of 2.5 million, but their hold is fragile as long as Assad’s forces can unleash their air power against fighters who are lightly armed.

The uprising, which began as peaceful protests, has become a brutal civil war. UN investigators have accused both sides of war crimes, but laid more blame on government troops than on the rebels.

The killings in Daraya, a working class Sunni Muslim town that sustained three days of bombardment before being overrun by the army on Friday, raised the daily death toll to 440 people on Saturday, an activist network called the Local Co-ordination Committees said.

Another network, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said at least eight people were killed and dozens wounded last night when security forces shelled the southern town of Basra al-Sham in Deraa province.

In Damascus, government helicopters hovered near the main Abbaside Square on Sunday and fired rockets and machine guns at eastern residential neighbourhoods where rebels continued guerrilla attacks against loyalists.

Assad, who met an Iranian parliamentary delegation in the capital on Sunday, said the crisis was the result of Western and regional states trying to crush Syria’s role in the “resistance” against Western and Israeli domination in the region.

The UN estimates that more than 18 000 people have been killed in the conflict that pits a mainly Sunni Muslim opposition against a ruling system dominated by the Assad family – members of the Alawite faith, an offshoot of Shia Islam.

Efforts to stop the violence in Syria are stalled by a stalemate between Western countries, Gulf Arab states and Turkey – who support the opposition – and Iran, Russia and China – who support Assad.

With veto-wielding Russia leading resistance to action against Assad, the UN Security Council remains deadlocked. – Reuters