Death squads on the loose, activists say
Beirut – Syrians in the city of Douma have recovered mutilated corpses and have sifted through rubbish for body parts hacked off by death squads who swept through anti-government districts after the army drove out rebel fighters, activists said today.
Video shot by opponents of President Bashar al-Assad in the city, about 15 kilometres north of the capital Damascus, showed gory scenes in homes the activists said had been overrun by progovernment ‘‘shabbiha’’ paramilitary gangs, after army shelling over the weekend forced rebel fighters to retreat.
State news agency Sana, reporting on a ministerial tour of Douma, painted a different picture which made no mention of killing or death.
Its report said essential services had been damaged and that many Douma residents had fled to the countryside to escape ‘‘terrorism’’.
There was no way of verifying the authenticity of the activists’ video or the information conveyed.
One resident named Ziad said 90 per cent of Douma’s residents had fled the city of around 110,000 inhabitants.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said it had stepped up its humanitarian work in Douma.
Sana published photographs of well-dressed officials touring tidy streets. The activists’ video, by contrast, showed what they said was the aftermath of carnage by the feared militiamen.
‘‘These are pieces of our children we’re pulling out of dumpsters . . . We found these body parts, and we are still looking for more. These are burned human body parts,’’ said a man picking through the contents of an overturned rubbish bin.
Meanwhile, Syrian troops pounded several districts of the central city of Homs today and clashed with rebels as at least 19 people were killed in violence across the country, a watchdog group said.
Troops rained shells on the besieged, rebel-held district of Khaldiyeh, killing two civilians and wounding seven others, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
It said living conditions Khaldiyeh were deteriorating.
Other areas of Homs saw fierce violence as regime forces pounded the districts of Sultaniyeh and Jobar, where families trapped by the fighting were ‘‘like the living dead’’, an activist said.
Life was ‘‘down to a bare minimum’’ in the impoverished neighbourhoods of Sultaniyeh and Jobar, which had been without electricity for days, said the activist, who identified himself as Abu Bakr.
He said rebels and troops also clashed today around the neighbourhood of Baba Amr – once a rebel-held district, which was reclaimed by the army in March after a month-long campaign of relentless shelling.
Syrian troops and rebels also clashed at dawn at Jaramana, a suburb south of Damascus, the British-based Observatory reported.
The fighting erupted near a branch of the feared air force intelligence service, it said.
Elsewhere, six civilians were killed in the northwestern province of Idlib, including four who were ambushed and killed by soldiers in the village of Maaret alNuman, the site of frequent violence, the Observatory added.
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