ANTAKYA, Turkey ? Scores of mutilated, bloodied bodies have been found dumped on the streets and on waste ground on the outskirts of Damascus in recent days, apparently the victims of a surge of extrajudicial killings by Syrian security forces seeking to drive rebel fighters out of the capital and its suburbs.
The scale of the current violence in Damascus eclipses the far better publicized battle underway for control of Syria?s commercial capital, Aleppo, in the north, where gains by rebel forces have enabled journalists to reach the front lines and where government artillery and aerial bombardments are causing most of the civilian casualties.
According to the Center for the Documentation of Violations in Syria, which monitors the victims of violence who can be identified by name, 730 civilians have been killed in Damascus so far in August and 529 in Aleppo, a discrepancy that has accelerated over the past week.
Some of the deaths in the Damascus area have also been caused by shelling and helicopter bombardments, as the government pounds areas known to support the rebels. But most of the dead are civilians who have disappeared in the wake of offensives or have been seized at checkpoints and whose bodies are later discovered in groups of as few as a handful or as many as several dozen, activists say.
In the most recent discoveries Thursday, nine corpses were found in a basement in the suburb of Moadamiya, not far from a building where 30 were found earlier in the week. Ten were also found in the Kfar Souseh neighborhood, a day after 24 people were reportedly killed there, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. On Wednesday, several dozen bodies were discovered in the suburb of Qabon, lying together along a roadside, covered in blood and with their throats slit, according to a highly graphic video posted on YouTube.
The details of the killings are impossible to confirm, and activists and human rights groups say they are finding it hard to verify the circumstances of the grisly deaths being recorded daily on videos posted online.
But the videos, along with the accounts of residents, point to a pattern of summary executions taking place on a scale unprecedented since the start of the 17-month-old uprising against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad. Most of the victims are men, some of them are elderly, many bear torture marks, and all appear to have died either from bullet wounds to the head or by having their throats slit.
?Clearly, while all the attention has been focused on Aleppo, there has been an increase in military operations around Damascus, and the number of people being killed in those battles is much higher than what is happening in Aleppo,? said Nadim Houry, of the New York-based Human Rights Watch, speaking from Beirut.
Shelling and raids by government forces have hindered researchers? access to the sites where bodies are being found, Houry noted. On Thursday, troops intensified an assault against the southwestern Damascus suburb of Darayya, a longtime opposition stronghold, hammering the area with artillery before raiding homes. The attack killed at least 15 people, according to the opposition Local Coordination Committees network.
Source: http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=dd12d6d86fa1653da7040f5e0c5249db
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