Dozens of Bodies Found in Town Outside Damascus

By Damien Cave, Hwaida Saad, The New York Times

26 August 12

ozens of bodies, possibly more than 200, were found Saturday in a town outside Damascus, raising the specter of a massacre by Syrian troops as bad as any atrocity committed since the Syrian uprising began nearly 18 months ago.

The circumstances and number of deaths in the town, a suburb named Daraya, could not be confirmed independently, and the reported death toll varied.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based group with a network of activists inside Syria, said early Saturday that there were 40 to 50 bodies, while another activist organization, the Local Coordination Committees, raised the toll to more than 200 that night.

The latter group said its activists found one mass body dump after another. They posted two videos showing what they said were different groups of victims; in one a series of charred bodies could be seen wrapped in blankets; in another, a far larger group of bodies - more than 150, according to the video's narrator - had been lined up together in a dark area of what was said to be a local mosque.

Activists said most of the people killed were executed by government forces, who have been shelling the town for days as part of a scorched-earth campaign by Syrian troops to wipe out rebels and their sympathizers in several suburbs of the capital.

Most of the victims appeared to be men, but the Daraya Coordination Committee, a branch of the Local Coordination Committees, said the dead included eight members of a single family, including three children and their mother.

That family could not be seen in the videos, which did not include details identifying the location, time or the sex of the victims.

Still, the violence described by the activists in Daraya fit a pattern of deaths that has begun to emerge after raids by government forces in several suburbs of Damascus. Over the past week, activists repeatedly reported that Syrian soldiers had invaded towns where rebels had control, only to leave piles of bodies behind.

In most cases, according to photos and video from activists, the victims have been young men who appear to have been shot in the head, but there have also been cases in which the victims appear to have been killed by shelling.

According to the Syrian Observatory's tally, August has been among the deadliest months of the conflict, and Daraya seems to have suffered an especially brutal campaign.

Activists said that the town, about four miles southwest of Damascus, held an important rebel armory and also a warehouse of food that they said appeared to have alarmed the Syrian troops, who blamed the entire community for supporting the opposition forces.

On Saturday night, the Local Coordination Committees said there were more bodies in the streets of the town that could not be reached because of snipers.

The government, in statements through its state news agencies, did not specifically mention Daraya on Saturday.

It has generally said very little about the campaign outside Damascus, but its usual explanation for raids involves what it describes as efforts to rid communities of "terrorists," its label for insurgents and their supporters.

Experts have said extrajudicial killings were a particularly Syrian brand of counterinsurgency, in which fear has been the dominant tool.

The challenge in this case will be confirming exactly what occurred. The United Nations observers who reported on previous accusations of human rights violations - in Houla, for example, where the United Nations confirmed in May that Syrian troops killed more than 100 people, including at least 32 children - have left Syria without plans to return.

Journalists did not appear to have reached the area by Saturday night.

Fighting also continued Saturday across the country, from Aleppo in the west to Deir al-Zour in the east.

Meanwhile, as the death toll grew inside Syria, the war's reach into Lebanon appeared to be receding, at least for now.

On Saturday, a Shiite family that had abducted dozens of Syrians inside Lebanon said that it would let all but a few of the captives go, and Syrian rebels released one of 11 Lebanese pilgrims kidnapped in May.

It was not clear if the releases were connected, but they both brought calm to a crisis that had seemed destined to escalate.

North of Beirut, in Tripoli, a cease-fire also seemed to hold after five days of extended gun battles between Lebanese Sunnis and Alawites loyal to Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad.

Maher al-Mikdad, the spokesman for the family that kidnapped more than 30 Syrians in retaliation for the abduction of a relative earlier this month in Syria, told reporters that his family let most of the captives go "as a good-will gesture."

He said that in order to press for the release of his relative, Hassan al-Mikdad, the Mikdad clan would hold four Syrians who he said were members of the Free Syrian Army, the main group of rebel fighters in Syria, and a Turkish man who was also kidnapped.