Activists reported new violence in southwest Syria on Saturday, saying shelling by troops and clashes between soldiers and rebel fighters in the city of Dara?a had claimed 17 lives, including women and children.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition group based in London, said the victims from the violence early on Saturday included 10 women, a 10-year-old girl and two teenage boys. Telephone services, including mobile phone networks, had been cut off, the organization said.
Dara?a, located near the border with Jordan, is where the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad?s regime began in March last year.
Saturday?s reports of new violence came a day after United Nations monitors in Syria collected evidence of a mass atrocity in the desolate hamlet of Qubeir. The monitoring team?s journey to Qubeir presented the outside world with the first visual proof from a neutral official source that a horrific crime had occurred there.
No corpses were found, and the team?s officials said many of the facts behind the killings, which occurred Wednesday, had yet to be determined. But it seemed clear that the perpetrators had hastily sought to conceal what had happened, reinforcing suspicions that the government, by thwarting the monitors? efforts to reach the site on Thursday, had bought time for a cover-up.
Activist groups have accused Mr. Assad of orchestrating the killings in a campaign to terrorize opponents in the uprising against him, which has grown more violent and sectarian despite numerous diplomatic entreaties and the presence of United Nations monitors since April.
Mr. Assad?s government, dominated by his minority Alawite sect, has denied responsibility for the killings in Qubeir, where the residents were part of the Sunni majority, and he has called the accusation a propagandist lie. But it remains unclear why the monitors were not permitted to visit the site much sooner.
?Some homes were damaged by rockets from B.M.P.?s, grenades and a range of caliber weapons,? a spokeswoman for the monitors, Sausan Ghosheh, said in an e-mailed description of the visit, using the abbreviation for a Russian-made armored personnel carrier used by the Syrian military. ?Inside some of the houses, the walls and floors were splatted with blood. Fire was still burning outside houses, and there was a strong stench of burnt flesh in the air.?
Amid the uproar over the Qubeir killings, the fourth massacre in Syria in two weeks, multiple clashes flared in other Syrian locales on Friday, including Damascus neighborhoods close to the center of the capital.
International efforts to find a way out of the Syrian crisis intensified in Washington, where Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, an outspoken opponent of President Assad, met privately with Kofi Annan, the special envoy of the United Nations and Arab League. Mr. Annan, whose peace plan that placed the monitors in Syria is widely considered a failure, has insisted the plan can work if the big powers put more pressure on Mr. Assad.
Antigovernment activists who first reported the Qubeir mass killings on Wednesday night, which they blamed on government troops and plainclothes militiamen known as shabiha, said that as many as 78 people, half of them women and children, were slaughtered in the hamlet, a clutch of low-lying farmhouses with a population of 130 amid cornfields about 20 miles from the city of Hama.
But Ms. Ghosheh, the spokeswoman, who accompanied the monitors, said the number and names of the victims had not been confirmed, the community was empty of residents, and ?thus the observers were not able to talk to anyone who witnessed Wednesday?s horrific tragedy.?
She said it would take time to sort out conflicting information from residents of neighboring villages. ?We need to go back, cross-reference what we have heard and check the names they say were killed, check the names they say are missing,? she said.
The monitoring team?s Qubeir video shows smoke outside homes, a large hole from an artillery shell, interior wreckage and bullet scarring, a bloodstained mattress, a congealed pool of blood and an unidentified man from a neighboring village holding a sheet with the remains of human flesh. Another unidentified man is seen pointing to a framed portrait, then breaking down in tears.
Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=839cd384d6dc43de1b25c46a24bf9ef3
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