BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syrian troops have killed hundreds of people suspected of being rebels and sympathizers over the past two days in a town outside Damascus, dumping executed victims in mosques and basements, activists said, raising the specter of a massacre by Syrian troops as bad as any atrocity committed since the Syrian uprising began nearly 18 months ago.
The circumstances and number of deaths in the town, a suburb named Daraya, could not be confirmed independently, but activists reported Sunday that the toll had grown as more bodies were discovered and counted.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a group based in Britain with a network of activists inside Syria, said Sunday that at least 200 people were killed Saturday in Daraya, pushing the town’s death toll to more than 300 over the past five days.
Another activist organization, the Local Coordination Committees, said that at least 300 were found dead on Saturday, including ‘'dozens of women and children.'’
‘'Daraya, a city of dignity, has paid a heavy price for demanding freedom,'’ the activist group said in a statement, adding: ‘'The death toll has doubled in the past few days due to field executions and revenge killings.'’
The campaign against Daraya began with heavy shelling last week. That was followed, activists said, by hundreds of Syrian soldiers entering the town, doing house-to-house searches, seizing and killing young men and discarding bodies along the way. On Sunday, the Local Coordination Committees said that a total of 1,755 people had been detained, suggesting that hundreds more might yet be killed.
On Saturday, the group said its activists found one mass body dump after another, in homes, basements, a mosque and on the streets. They posted two videos showing what they said were different groups of victims. In one a series of charred bodies could be seen wrapped in blankets; in another, a far larger group of bodies — more than 150, according to the video’s narrator — had been lined up together in a dark area of what was said to be a local mosque.
Activists said that most of the people killed were executed by government forces, who have been engaged in a scorched-earth campaign to wipe out rebels, activists and anyone who supports them in several suburbs of the capital.
Most of the victims appeared to be men, but the Daraya Coordination Committee, a branch of the Local Coordination Committees, said the dead included eight members of a single family, including three children and their mother. The group said Sunday that more children had been found as well.
Children could not be seen in the videos, which did not include details identifying the location, time or the sex of the victims.
Still, the violence described by the activists in Daraya fit a pattern of deaths that has begun to emerge after raids by government forces in several suburbs of Damascus. Over the past week, activists repeatedly reported that Syrian soldiers had invaded towns where rebels had control, only to leave piles of bodies behind.
In most cases, according to photos and video from activists, the victims have been young men who appear to have been shot in the head, but there have also been cases in which the victims appear to have been killed by shelling.
According to the Syrian Observatory’s tally, August has been among the deadliest months of the conflict, and Daraya seems to have suffered an especially brutal blow.
Activists said that the town, about four miles southwest of Damascus, held an important rebel armory and also a warehouse of food that they said appeared to have alarmed the Syrian troops, who blamed the entire community for supporting the opposition forces.
On Saturday night, the Local Coordination Committees said there were more bodies in the streets of the town that could not be reached because of snipers.
Syria sought to place blame on the rebels, issuing a statement through its state news agency that said: ‘'Our heroic armed forces cleansed Daraya from remnants of armed terrorist groups who committed crimes against the sons of the town and scared them and sabotaged and destroyed public and private property.'’
Experts have said extrajudicial killings were a particularly Syrian brand of counterinsurgency, in which fear has been the dominant tool.
The challenge in this case will be to confirm exactly what occurred. The U.N. observers who reported previous accusations of human rights violations — in Houla, for example, where the United Nations confirmed in May that Syrian troops killed more than 100 people, including at least 32 children — have left Syria without plans to return.
Journalists did not appear to have reached the area by Saturday night.
Fighting also continued Saturday across the country, from Aleppo in the west to Deir al-Zour in the east.
Meanwhile, as the death toll grew inside Syria, the war’s reach into Lebanon appeared to be receding, at least for now.
On Saturday, a Shiite family that had abducted dozens of Syrians inside Lebanon said that it would release all but a few of the captives, and Syrian rebels released one of 11 Lebanese pilgrims kidnapped in May.
It was not clear if the releases were connected, but they both brought calm to a crisis that had seemed destined to escalate.
North of Beirut, in Tripoli, a cease-fire also seemed to hold after five days of extended gun battles between Lebanese Sunnis and Alawites loyal to Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad.
Maher al-Mikdad, the spokesman for the family that kidnapped more than 30 Syrians in retaliation for the abduction of a relative earlier this month in Syria, told reporters that his family let most of the captives go ‘'as a good-will gesture.'’
He said that in order to press for the release of his relative, Hassan al-Mikdad, the Mikdad clan would hold four Syrians who he said were members of the Free Syrian Army, the main group of rebel fighters in Syria, and a Turkish man who was also kidnapped.
The circumstances and number of deaths in the town, a suburb named Daraya, could not be confirmed independently, but activists reported Sunday that the toll had grown as more bodies were discovered and counted.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a group based in Britain with a network of activists inside Syria, said Sunday that at least 200 people were killed Saturday in Daraya, pushing the town’s death toll to more than 300 over the past five days.
Another activist organization, the Local Coordination Committees, said that at least 300 were found dead on Saturday, including ‘'dozens of women and children.'’
‘'Daraya, a city of dignity, has paid a heavy price for demanding freedom,'’ the activist group said in a statement, adding: ‘'The death toll has doubled in the past few days due to field executions and revenge killings.'’
The campaign against Daraya began with heavy shelling last week. That was followed, activists said, by hundreds of Syrian soldiers entering the town, doing house-to-house searches, seizing and killing young men and discarding bodies along the way. On Sunday, the Local Coordination Committees said that a total of 1,755 people had been detained, suggesting that hundreds more might yet be killed.
On Saturday, the group said its activists found one mass body dump after another, in homes, basements, a mosque and on the streets. They posted two videos showing what they said were different groups of victims. In one a series of charred bodies could be seen wrapped in blankets; in another, a far larger group of bodies — more than 150, according to the video’s narrator — had been lined up together in a dark area of what was said to be a local mosque.
Activists said that most of the people killed were executed by government forces, who have been engaged in a scorched-earth campaign to wipe out rebels, activists and anyone who supports them in several suburbs of the capital.
Most of the victims appeared to be men, but the Daraya Coordination Committee, a branch of the Local Coordination Committees, said the dead included eight members of a single family, including three children and their mother. The group said Sunday that more children had been found as well.
Children could not be seen in the videos, which did not include details identifying the location, time or the sex of the victims.
Still, the violence described by the activists in Daraya fit a pattern of deaths that has begun to emerge after raids by government forces in several suburbs of Damascus. Over the past week, activists repeatedly reported that Syrian soldiers had invaded towns where rebels had control, only to leave piles of bodies behind.
In most cases, according to photos and video from activists, the victims have been young men who appear to have been shot in the head, but there have also been cases in which the victims appear to have been killed by shelling.
According to the Syrian Observatory’s tally, August has been among the deadliest months of the conflict, and Daraya seems to have suffered an especially brutal blow.
Activists said that the town, about four miles southwest of Damascus, held an important rebel armory and also a warehouse of food that they said appeared to have alarmed the Syrian troops, who blamed the entire community for supporting the opposition forces.
On Saturday night, the Local Coordination Committees said there were more bodies in the streets of the town that could not be reached because of snipers.
Syria sought to place blame on the rebels, issuing a statement through its state news agency that said: ‘'Our heroic armed forces cleansed Daraya from remnants of armed terrorist groups who committed crimes against the sons of the town and scared them and sabotaged and destroyed public and private property.'’
Experts have said extrajudicial killings were a particularly Syrian brand of counterinsurgency, in which fear has been the dominant tool.
The challenge in this case will be to confirm exactly what occurred. The U.N. observers who reported previous accusations of human rights violations — in Houla, for example, where the United Nations confirmed in May that Syrian troops killed more than 100 people, including at least 32 children — have left Syria without plans to return.
Journalists did not appear to have reached the area by Saturday night.
Fighting also continued Saturday across the country, from Aleppo in the west to Deir al-Zour in the east.
Meanwhile, as the death toll grew inside Syria, the war’s reach into Lebanon appeared to be receding, at least for now.
On Saturday, a Shiite family that had abducted dozens of Syrians inside Lebanon said that it would release all but a few of the captives, and Syrian rebels released one of 11 Lebanese pilgrims kidnapped in May.
It was not clear if the releases were connected, but they both brought calm to a crisis that had seemed destined to escalate.
North of Beirut, in Tripoli, a cease-fire also seemed to hold after five days of extended gun battles between Lebanese Sunnis and Alawites loyal to Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad.
Maher al-Mikdad, the spokesman for the family that kidnapped more than 30 Syrians in retaliation for the abduction of a relative earlier this month in Syria, told reporters that his family let most of the captives go ‘'as a good-will gesture.'’
He said that in order to press for the release of his relative, Hassan al-Mikdad, the Mikdad clan would hold four Syrians who he said were members of the Free Syrian Army, the main group of rebel fighters in Syria, and a Turkish man who was also kidnapped.