Syria massacre: UN observers greeted by smell of rotting flesh

Video footage showed a woman in full black burka standing alone in the
desecrated village screaming: “Assad did this. Security forces killed
our boys”.

No bodies were found in the village. Activists told the Daily Telegraph that
many had been swiftly buried in line with Islamic tradition. “We waited
and waited for the monitors to come on Thursday, but they did not. We held
funerals and buried them,” said Mr Hemary.

Who perpetrated the crime has yet to proven. Residents described the massacre
as an act of sectarian revenge, blaming pro-government militiamen from the
minority Alawite sect of President Bashar al-Assad.

A 35-year-old female survivor using the pseudonym Fatma al-Hamory told the
Daily Telegraph of the moment the attackers arrived. If true, her account
implicates the regime’s security forces in a massacre that counted among the
bloodiest incidents since the onset of Syria’s uprising.

“When it happened, I was 200 meters away,” she said. “I was
taking some food to my brother who was out irrigating our land.

“[When the attack began] my brother ran back to our house. They [the
perpetrators] shot him in the leg, and hit him at his head. And then they
placed him on a tank and took him”.

“They were shouting; ‘Assad or we burn the country’.”

As the opposition Syrian
National Council blamed the regime for the killings, rebel fighters went on
the offensive against government forces.

Lieutenant Khaled Ali, spokesman for the opposition Military Council in the
nearby city of Hama, said they undertook two operations yesterday, both in “revenge
for the Qubeir massacre”. Rebels of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) attacked
three checkpoints with rocket-propelled grenades, capturing one, and
destroyed three tanks, he said.

The escalation reached the capital, Damascus, where a bomb was reported to
have killed two soldiers on a military bus.

Describing the peace plan proposed by Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary
general, as “dead”, Lt Ali added: “We have the capacity to
step up operations more than this… but not to the point of winning control
of the whole country if we do it alone. We are fighting a strong national
army that has been arming itself for 40 years.”

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