Regime troops today killed at least 21 people in a blistering assault on a central village, a watchdog said, while twin blasts rocked Damascus and Syria’s second city Aleppo was hit by air strikes.
As the violence raged, new international peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi said change in Syria was “unavoidable,”
although he carefully refrained from calling for Assad to step down, as his predecessor Kofi Annan had.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said it expected the death toll to mount from the army offensive on Al-Fan
village in Hama province, one of the main arenas of conflict in the more than 17-month uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.
The Britain-based watchdog had no details on whether those killed were civilians or rebel fighters, “but all 21 of
the dead were men,” said its director Rami Abdel Rahman.
Horrific images shot and posted on YouTube by activists in Al-Fan showed a long row of bodies shrouded in white
cloths, laid out on the ground surrounded by scores of weeping men, women and children.
State news agency SANA said all of those killed during the Al-Fan clashes were from “an armed terrorist group that
was attacking citizens and security forces.”
In Damascus, twin bombs exploded near a tightly guarded government compound in the heart of the city, wounding four
people, state television said.
The bombings struck in Abu Remmaneh district where security buildings and the office of Vice President Faruq
al-Shara are located, the television said, blaming “terrorists.”
They were among at least 168 people killed yesterday — 110 civilians, 32 soldiers and 26 rebels, the Observatory
said. The watchdog gave a preliminary toll of 66 people killed on Sunday — 51 civilians, 12 soldiers and three rebels.
————————–AFP