Civilian deaths hit high in last month’s fighting
About 5,000 were killed in nation’s civil war in August, activist groups say
BEIRUT — Activist groups said Sunday that about 5,000 people were killed in Syria’s civil war in August, the highest figure ever reported in more than 17 months of fighting as President Bashar Assad’s regime unleashed crushing air power against the revolt for the first time.
The U.N. children’s fund UNICEF put the death toll for last week alone at 1,600, the largest weekly figure for the entire uprising.
“The past month witnessed large massacres, and the regime was conducting wide operations to try to crush the uprising,” said Omar Idilbi, a Cairo-based activist with the Local Coordination Committees group. “Last month’s acts of violence were unprecedented.”
He said the increased use of the air force and artillery bombardments was behind the spike in casualties.
The civil war witnessed a major turning point in August when Assad’s forces began widely using air power for the first time to try to put down the revolt. The fighting also reached Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, which had been relatively quiet for most of the uprising.
The Britain-based activist group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that 5,440 people, including 4,114 civilians were killed in August. The LCC put the toll at 4,933 civilians.
Syria’s uprising has been the bloodiest in the Arab Spring that has already removed longserving authoritarian leaders in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Libya.
“The reason behind the high death toll is military operations, shelling, clashes and air raids,” said Rami Abdul-Rahman who heads the Observatory.
“I would say most people are being killed during clashes and executions,” he said referring to scores of bodies that are found in streets around Syria who are shot execution style with a bullet in the back of their heads.
In the latest violence on Sunday, the Observatory said the military pounded rebel holdouts in Aleppo, the country’s commercial capital. There was also fighting in other areas including the central city of Homs, Idlib province on the border of Turkey and suburbs near Damascus.
The Observatory said 21 people were killed when troops stormed the village of Alfan in the central province of Hama. It added that eight people were killed in the oil-rich eastern province of Deir el-Zour that borders Iraq.
An amateur video posted online showed more than a dozen bodies in Alfan covered with white shrouds in accordance with Islamic tradi- tion as men and women sat around them crying and hugging the dead. A woman opened the shroud to see the face of one of the dead, then started weeping.
Loud screams of prayers could be heard in a hall that appeared to be inside a mosque.
In the capital, Damascus, two bombs exploded near the Syrian military’s joint chiefs of staff offices, lightly wounding four army officers and damaging buildings and cars, state television reported. The twin blasts in the posh Abu Rummaneh district were the latest in a wave of bombings to hit Damascus in recent months as clashes between government troops and rebels reached the tightly controlled capital.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombings, which government officials said appeared to target a building under construction near the offices of the joint chiefs of staff.