[h=3]By NOUR MALAS[/h]BEIRUT—The Syrian government and opposition traded blame Friday for what both sides called a massacre of scores of people a day earlier in a poor farming village, in perhaps the deadliest in a string of attacks on the largely opposition-controlled countryside of central Syria.
Tanks rained shells and machine-gun fire on the village of Treimseh for six hours before pro-government gunmen from neighboring villages moved in and attacked people with guns and knives, according to anti-regime activists from the city of Hama, about 10 miles away, and a resident of Treimseh. There were also some 250 antiregime fighters in the town—some of whom recently relocated there with their families after fleeing attacks in nearby towns—fought with government forces for hours before the military withdrew, these people said.
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In initial accounts of the violence, some activists had said that as many as 200 people were killed in the farming village, which has been active in protests since the start of the uprising last year. But according to two local activists' tallies of confirmed names, the number of dead stood at 74 on Friday. These activists said they expected the number to double as they continued to clean and count bodies piled at the local mosque and found strewn in peach groves, alleyways and in the Orontes river that abuts the village.
The accounts echoed those of killings earlier this summer in the Hama and Homs countryside that marked an increasingly sectarian phase of Syria's conflict. Many Sunni residents there now say neighboring Alawites—from the minority Shiite-linked sect that rules Syria—are carrying out what they call a government campaign to reclaim towns that have fallen out of regime control and to purge the area's largely Sunni opposition.
Syria's government likewise reported a massacre in Treimseh. In its telling, terrorists—a blanket term that state media often uses to characterize anti-regime forces—stormed the village, killing more than 50 people, including three state security personnel. It described the attack "as a bid to manipulate public opinion against Syria and its people and to bring foreign intervention in Syria on the eve of a U.N. Security Council session."
Associated PressUnited Nations and Arab League special envoy for Syria envoy, Kofi Annan, said he was "shocked and appalled" by reports of the mass killing.
The government had similarly blamed opposition gunmen for carrying out previous large-scale killings—in May in Houla, and in June in Qubair—saying these regime opponents had attempted to pin the attacks on the government in a bid to provoke international intervention in the country's crisis.
Violence from both sides in Syria's conflict has escalated since the Houla killings, derailing a United Nations-brokered cease-fire. The U.N. Security Council continued talks Friday on rival resolutions drafted by Russia and Western states on Syria—a continuation of a long standoff in which the U.S. and its allies have called, to Russia's objection, for President Bashar al-Assad to leave power.
"History will judge this Council," U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in a statement Friday, in which she expressed outrage at the Treimseh attack and squarely blamed the Syrian regime for what she characterized as an unconscionable massacre carried out by tanks, artillery and helicopters. "The Security Council should put its full weight behind...an immediate ceasefire and a political transition."
The Council is also expected to debate whether to resume or extend the work of unarmed U.N. monitors, whose work has been frozen by the violence. The mission' Council mandate expires next week.
In Treimseh, home to nearly 10,000 people, a 25-year-old resident said he had witnessed Thursday's siege and bombardment and spent much of Friday helping to bury 40 bodies in a mass grave.
"Today, it is quiet, but we are devastated," said the man, reached Friday by international cellphone. He identified himself as the village's representative for the Syrian Revolution General Commission, the broadest grassroots activist network. He and three activists in Hama described nearly identical accounts of the attack.
Tanks and armoured vehicles, they said, began moving toward Treimseh at around 5 a.m., surrounding it from four sides before starting to spray machine-gun fire and artillery into the village. The opposition fighters, associated with the rebel Free Syrian Army, began to mobilize and fire at the troops, these activists said. The attack lasted until about 11 a.m., when tanks, soldiers and security forces moved into the village.
"When the ground attack began, it became a street war," the resident said. "The Free Syrian Army couldn't fight that much, because they didn't have so many weapons."
Military forces withdrew at around 8 p.m., he and other activists said. People ran out to help the injured get to a field hospital about three miles away.
"It was bodies, bodies everywhere. We gathered everyone—dead, alive, injured—in the big mosque," he said. Thirteen bodies were pulled out of the river, as well as two injured people who said they had been dumped there by the pro-government gunmen, he said.
Activists from Hama said the Treimseh resident was one of a handful of people in Treimseh to inform others of events there late Thursday.
"At 9 pm, I got the first [text] message from him. He wrote: They have destroyed us, my brother. They destroyed Treimseh," said the spokesman for the same activist network in Hama.
Videos filmed by activists emerged hours later. One appears to show a tank firing in the direction of a cluster of small homes, each surrounded by a concrete gate. Another shows 19 bloodied and charred bodies, mostly men in colourful T-shirts and jeans, lined up in a room, piles of flesh scattered on and around their bodies. One man's face is partly burned off.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a U.K.-based opposition group that monitors events in Syria, said that at least 30 of 50 people it confirmed killed in Treimseh appeared to have been entirely burned.
In a third video, a young man leans weeping over a body, named by the video's narrator as that of Mahmoud Ahmad Delleh, wrapped in a blanket. "Get up, Dad, for God's sake," he says twice, the sound of firing going off in the background.
Many people were killed when homes collapsed on them, the resident said. Others were met by pro-regime thugs—who he identified as Alawites from a neighboring village—as they ran to peach orchards outside the village, where they were killed.
The local activists said they feared the initial death toll of 200—reported late Thursday by activists calling into the pan-Arab channel Al Jazeera—were frantic, confused reports that could discredit their accounts.
"We're facing a real war," said the Hama spokesman for the Revolutionary Commission. "We don't need to make up numbers."
Other activists said most of those killed were male rebel fighters from nearby villages, and accused the opposition of exaggerating accounts "to prove that the regime is bloodthirsty."
Mousab Alhamadee, an activist in Hama with another grassroots group, the Local Coordination Committees, disputed accounts that rebel fighters picked a fight with government forces, or that government forces were rooting out fighters from a rebel stronghold.
"This is just an excuse for a new massacre," Mr. Alhamadee said.
"In all Syria cities and towns, we have defected soldiers. Some of them are just defectors coming home to their families, not joining the Free Syrian Army," he said. "The regime is committing massacre after massacre without being held accountable for that, so it just moving from village to village."
—Sam Dagher in Beirut contributed to this article.
Tanks rained shells and machine-gun fire on the village of Treimseh for six hours before pro-government gunmen from neighboring villages moved in and attacked people with guns and knives, according to anti-regime activists from the city of Hama, about 10 miles away, and a resident of Treimseh. There were also some 250 antiregime fighters in the town—some of whom recently relocated there with their families after fleeing attacks in nearby towns—fought with government forces for hours before the military withdrew, these people said.
[h=3]Related Video[/h]
U.S. officials said that Syria has begun moving parts of its vast chemical weapons arsenal out of storage facilities. Julian Barnes has details on The News Hub. (Photo: Reuters)
In initial accounts of the violence, some activists had said that as many as 200 people were killed in the farming village, which has been active in protests since the start of the uprising last year. But according to two local activists' tallies of confirmed names, the number of dead stood at 74 on Friday. These activists said they expected the number to double as they continued to clean and count bodies piled at the local mosque and found strewn in peach groves, alleyways and in the Orontes river that abuts the village.
The accounts echoed those of killings earlier this summer in the Hama and Homs countryside that marked an increasingly sectarian phase of Syria's conflict. Many Sunni residents there now say neighboring Alawites—from the minority Shiite-linked sect that rules Syria—are carrying out what they call a government campaign to reclaim towns that have fallen out of regime control and to purge the area's largely Sunni opposition.
Syria's government likewise reported a massacre in Treimseh. In its telling, terrorists—a blanket term that state media often uses to characterize anti-regime forces—stormed the village, killing more than 50 people, including three state security personnel. It described the attack "as a bid to manipulate public opinion against Syria and its people and to bring foreign intervention in Syria on the eve of a U.N. Security Council session."
Associated PressUnited Nations and Arab League special envoy for Syria envoy, Kofi Annan, said he was "shocked and appalled" by reports of the mass killing.
The government had similarly blamed opposition gunmen for carrying out previous large-scale killings—in May in Houla, and in June in Qubair—saying these regime opponents had attempted to pin the attacks on the government in a bid to provoke international intervention in the country's crisis.
Violence from both sides in Syria's conflict has escalated since the Houla killings, derailing a United Nations-brokered cease-fire. The U.N. Security Council continued talks Friday on rival resolutions drafted by Russia and Western states on Syria—a continuation of a long standoff in which the U.S. and its allies have called, to Russia's objection, for President Bashar al-Assad to leave power.
"History will judge this Council," U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in a statement Friday, in which she expressed outrage at the Treimseh attack and squarely blamed the Syrian regime for what she characterized as an unconscionable massacre carried out by tanks, artillery and helicopters. "The Security Council should put its full weight behind...an immediate ceasefire and a political transition."
The Council is also expected to debate whether to resume or extend the work of unarmed U.N. monitors, whose work has been frozen by the violence. The mission' Council mandate expires next week.
In Treimseh, home to nearly 10,000 people, a 25-year-old resident said he had witnessed Thursday's siege and bombardment and spent much of Friday helping to bury 40 bodies in a mass grave.
"Today, it is quiet, but we are devastated," said the man, reached Friday by international cellphone. He identified himself as the village's representative for the Syrian Revolution General Commission, the broadest grassroots activist network. He and three activists in Hama described nearly identical accounts of the attack.
Tanks and armoured vehicles, they said, began moving toward Treimseh at around 5 a.m., surrounding it from four sides before starting to spray machine-gun fire and artillery into the village. The opposition fighters, associated with the rebel Free Syrian Army, began to mobilize and fire at the troops, these activists said. The attack lasted until about 11 a.m., when tanks, soldiers and security forces moved into the village.
"When the ground attack began, it became a street war," the resident said. "The Free Syrian Army couldn't fight that much, because they didn't have so many weapons."
Military forces withdrew at around 8 p.m., he and other activists said. People ran out to help the injured get to a field hospital about three miles away.
"It was bodies, bodies everywhere. We gathered everyone—dead, alive, injured—in the big mosque," he said. Thirteen bodies were pulled out of the river, as well as two injured people who said they had been dumped there by the pro-government gunmen, he said.
Activists from Hama said the Treimseh resident was one of a handful of people in Treimseh to inform others of events there late Thursday.
"At 9 pm, I got the first [text] message from him. He wrote: They have destroyed us, my brother. They destroyed Treimseh," said the spokesman for the same activist network in Hama.
Videos filmed by activists emerged hours later. One appears to show a tank firing in the direction of a cluster of small homes, each surrounded by a concrete gate. Another shows 19 bloodied and charred bodies, mostly men in colourful T-shirts and jeans, lined up in a room, piles of flesh scattered on and around their bodies. One man's face is partly burned off.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a U.K.-based opposition group that monitors events in Syria, said that at least 30 of 50 people it confirmed killed in Treimseh appeared to have been entirely burned.
In a third video, a young man leans weeping over a body, named by the video's narrator as that of Mahmoud Ahmad Delleh, wrapped in a blanket. "Get up, Dad, for God's sake," he says twice, the sound of firing going off in the background.
Many people were killed when homes collapsed on them, the resident said. Others were met by pro-regime thugs—who he identified as Alawites from a neighboring village—as they ran to peach orchards outside the village, where they were killed.
The local activists said they feared the initial death toll of 200—reported late Thursday by activists calling into the pan-Arab channel Al Jazeera—were frantic, confused reports that could discredit their accounts.
"We're facing a real war," said the Hama spokesman for the Revolutionary Commission. "We don't need to make up numbers."
Other activists said most of those killed were male rebel fighters from nearby villages, and accused the opposition of exaggerating accounts "to prove that the regime is bloodthirsty."
Mousab Alhamadee, an activist in Hama with another grassroots group, the Local Coordination Committees, disputed accounts that rebel fighters picked a fight with government forces, or that government forces were rooting out fighters from a rebel stronghold.
"This is just an excuse for a new massacre," Mr. Alhamadee said.
"In all Syria cities and towns, we have defected soldiers. Some of them are just defectors coming home to their families, not joining the Free Syrian Army," he said. "The regime is committing massacre after massacre without being held accountable for that, so it just moving from village to village."
—Sam Dagher in Beirut contributed to this article.