Dozens of civilians were killed in cold blood in the Syrian city of Homs, opposition activists and Syrian state media said yesterday, although they disputed responsibility for what both sides called a massacre.
The carnage in Homs, as well as a military assault on the northwestern city of Idlib, coincided with a weekend peace mission by UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan, who left Damascus on Sunday without an agreement on a truce or humanitarian access.
“The terrorist armed groups have kidnapped scores of civilians in the city of Homs, central Syria, killed and mutilated their corpses ,and filmed them to be shown by media outlets,” state news agency SANA said on its Web site.
Footage posted by opposition activists on YouTube showed men, women and children lying dead in a blood-drenched room.
The Local Coordination Committees of Syria, a grassroots opposition network, said at least 45 women and children had been stabbed and burned in the Homs district of Karm al-Zeitoun.
It said another seven people were slain in the city’s Jobar district, which adjoins the former rebel bastion of Baba Amr.
Activists contacted in Homs accused Alawite shabbiha militia loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad of carrying out the killings under the protection of regular Syrian military forces.
Waleed Fares, an activist in Homs’ Khalidiyah district, which is about 1km from Karm al-Zeitoun, said that 30 to 40 tanks had arrived in Karm al-Zeitoun on Sunday night.
“We know now that four families have been killed by shabbiha. We have 21 names and we are trying to confirm the names of the rest,” he said via Skype, adding that the victims were all from Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority. “It’s quiet now, but I have been hearing gunfire all night.”
Fares said most of the killings occurred in Karm al-Zeitoun, but some took place in other districts.
“The Free Syrian army helped move the bodies to one place. Otherwise the regime forces would have hidden the evidence,” he said.
Syrian government restrictions on the media have made it hard to assess conflicting reports by the authorities and their opponents since an uprising against al-Assad began a year ago.
SANA said the Homs killings “perpetrated by the armed terrorist groups and aired by [satellite TV channels] Al Jazeera and Arabiya ... coincide with today’s UN Security Council session to call for foreign interference in Syria.”
In the southern city of Daraa, scene of sporadic street fighting between Free Syrian Army rebels and al-Assad’s troops, a car bomb killed a schoolgirl and wounded 25 others at a girls’ school. An opposition activist said members of the school had taken part in anti-Assad demonstrations.
The UN Security Council was to hold a special meeting on Arab revolts yesterday and US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was to meet Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on the sidelines.
Russia and China have blocked attempts to pass a Security Council resolution condemning Damascus for its attempts to crush the rebellion, in which the UN says more than 7,500 people have been killed. Syrian authorities said in December that insurgents had killed more than 2,000 soldiers and police.
China and Russia, as well as Western and Arab nations, have voiced support for Annan’s peace mission, but no common ground has emerged between al-Assad, who is bent on crushing dissent, and his opponents, who are determined to overthrow him.
“The situation is so bad and so dangerous that all of us cannot afford to fail,” Annan said in Damascus on Sunday.
A UN spokesman said Annan had met the emir and prime minister of Qatar in Doha yesterday and was heading for Ankara for talks with Turkey’s prime minister. Annan has said he wants a ceasefire and access for humanitarian aid agencies to civilians in strife-hit areas as a first step before a political dialogue among all parties.
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