Assad forces blamed for massacre of 320
Women and children among dead
ALEPPO, Syria — Syrian opposition activists accused President Bashar alAssad’s army on Sunday of massacring hundreds of people in a town close to the capital that government forces recaptured from rebels.
In the town of Daraya to the southwest of Damascus, some 320 bodies, including women and children, were found in houses and basements, according to activists who said most had been killed “execution style” by troops in house to house raids.
Activists uploaded several videos to the Internet showing rows of bloodied bodies wrapped in sheets.
Due to restrictions on non-state media in Syria, it was impossible to independently verify the accounts.
Clashes are raging across Syria as the 17-month-old rebellion grows increasingly bloody, particularly in the northern city of Aleppo, where the army and rebels appear stuck in a war of attrition.
Fighting in Aleppo on Sunday was the heaviest in the past week, according to Reuters journalists on the ground.
Fighter jets dropped bombs and fired missiles on rebel-held districts in the south of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, as residents fled in panic. Reuters journalists there heard heavy explosions as clouds of black smoke rose a kilometre into the air.
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 and pro-government militia than on the rebels.
The killings in Daraya, a working class Sunni Muslim town that sustained three days of heavy bombardment before being overrun by the army on Friday, raised the daily death toll to 440 people on Saturday, one of the highest since the uprising began, an activist network called the Local Coordination Committees said.