Massacre Is Reported in Homs, Raising Pressure for Intervention in Syria

By ANNE BARNARD

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syrian opposition activists said on Monday that soldiers and pro-government thugs had rounded up scores of civilians in the devastated central city of Homs overnight, assaulted men and women, then killed dozens of them, including children, and set some bodies on fire. Syria immediately denied responsibility.

The attacks prompted a major exile opposition group to sharpen its calls for international military action and arming of the rebels. Some activists called the killings a new phase of the crackdown that appeared aimed at frightening people into fleeing Homs, an epicenter of the rebellion that the Syrian government had claimed just a few weeks ago it had already pacified after a month of shelling and shootings.

The government reported the killings as well but attributed them to “terrorist armed groups,” a description it routinely uses for opponents, including armed men, army defectors and protesters in the year-old uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.

Syria’s restrictions on outside press access made it impossible to reconcile the contradictory accounts of the killings, which appeared to be one of the worst atrocities in the conflict. But accounts of witnesses and images posted on YouTube gave some credence to the opposition’s claims that government operatives were responsible.

An activist in Homs, Wael al-Homsi, said in a telephone interview that he had counted dozens of bodies, including those of women and children, in the Karm el-Zeitoun neighborhood of Homs while helping move them to a rebel-controlled area in cars and pickup trucks. He said residents had told him that about 500 athletically built armed men, in civilian clothes and military uniforms, had killed members of nine families and burned their houses, adding, “There are still bodies under the wreckage.

“I’ve seen a lot of bodies but today it was a different sight, especially dismembered children,” Mr. Homsi said. “I haven’t eaten or drunk anything since yesterday.”

In a video posted on YouTube, a man being treated for what appeared to be bullet wounds in his back said he had escaped the killings in Karm al-Zeitoun. “We were arrested by the army, then handed over to the shabiha,” he said, using a common word for pro-government thugs. After two hours of beating, he said: “They poured fuel over us. They shot us — 30 or 40 persons.”

Both activists and the Syrian government described the attacks as “a massacre,” a day after a special emissary of the United Nations and the Arab League, Kofi Annan, a former United Nations secretary general, left the country without reaching a deal to end the fighting.

News of the killings came as the United Nations Security Council debated in New York, where the United States and Russia, Syria’s main international backer, tangled over how to address the Syria crisis.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called on Russia and China, which have vetoed previous resolutions aimed at holding Mr. Assad accountable and beginning a political transition, to join international “humanitarian and political efforts” to end the crisis, which she attributed directly to Mr. Assad.

Mrs. Clinton added, referring to shelling and other government military action in Syrian cities over the weekend, “How cynical that, even as Assad was receiving former Secretary General Kofi Annan, the Syrian Army was conducting a fresh assault on Idlib and continuing its aggression in Hama, Homs and Rastan.”

Her Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov, agreed that any solution in Syria “requires an immediate end of violence.” But he said armed elements of the opposition in Syria were also responsible for the crisis there, and that the Security Council must act “without imposing any prejudged solutions.”

Mrs. Clinton had a separate meeting with Mr. Lavrov, calling it “constructive.” She told reporters he would deliver to Moscow her “very strong view that the alternative to our unity on these points will be bloody internal conflict with dangerous consequences for the whole region.”

The Syrian National Council, the main expatriate opposition group, held a news conference in Istanbul and issued a statement that intensified longstanding calls by some of its members for outside military action. George Sabra, an executive board member and a spokesman for the council, told reporters that it was a moral imperative for the international community to stop the killing and to arm the opposition Free Syrian Army.

“Words are no longer enough to satisfy the Syrian people. Therefore, we call for practical decisions and actions against the gangs of Assad. We demand Arab and international military intervention,” he said. The council, however, does not represent the entire opposition, which has struggled to agree on a unified message and includes people who oppose further militarizing the uprising, which has come to resemble a civil war.

The United Nations estimates that 7,500 people have died since the crackdown began, making Syria’s the bloodiest of the Arab revolts.

Some individual council members have long pushed for various degrees of armed opposition. But Samir Nachar, a member of the executive office of the council, said that the overnight killings had taken the government’s crackdown to a new level and that the council would intensify public calls for the use of force.

“All these massacres are ethnic and sectarian cleansing against people in Homs. They’re terrorizing people there in an attempt to make them flee the city,” he said. “Bashar is saying, ‘I will carry on,’ so what political solution are we still seeking?”

Reports of the Homs killings also prompted street protests in at least five Syrian towns and cities, including the commercial center of Aleppo and the southern city of Dara’a, where the uprising began, according to the Local Coordinating Committees, an activist group.

Activists’ reports of killings in at least two neighborhoods in Homs varied in some of the details and in the death tolls, which were estimated at between 47 and 53.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights, echoing what individual activists said in videos and interviews, said in an e-mail that the army had arrested several families and took them to shabiha in nearby neighborhoods known for supporting the government. About 30 men were tortured, shot, doused with gasoline and set on fire, and women and children were killed separately, according to the group, which is based in London.

But the state news agency said it was “terrorist armed groups” who had “kidnapped scores of civilians, mutilated their corpses and filmed them to be shown by media outlets.”

Mulham al-Jundi, an activist from Homs who fled the city a few days earlier, said in a Skype interview that he had spoken with an activist who had filmed the bodies, Karam Abu Rabeaa. He said that the neighborhood was deserted and that some kidnapped women were still missing.

In an activist video, a distraught man pointed to what appeared to be 6 bodies wrapped in blankets in one room of a building, and at least 10 more crammed into another small, blood-spattered room.

“The army encircled the area and the shabiha entered,” a man declared in a video posted on YouTube. “Where are you, Arabs?” he shouted. “Where are you, Kofi Annan?”

Mr. Annan said through a spokesman on Monday that he felt that his Syria mediation mission was moving in the right direction despite the new spasms of violence.

“This is the beginning of a process, and the joint special envoy feels the process is on the right track,” his spokesman, Ahmed Fawzi, told reporters.

Reporting was contributed by Hala Droubi, Hwaida Saad and Kareem Fahim from Beirut, Alan Cowell from London, Dan Bilefsky and Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul, Steven Lee Myers from Washington, and Rick Gladstone from New York.

2011 The New York Times Company

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Tuesday, March 13, 2012