Claims and counterclaims of brutal civilian killings in
Syria's battered central city of Homs emerged on Monday, a day after a
U.N. envoy ended two days of meetings with President Bashar al-Assad
without securing a deal to end the nearly year-old conflict.
Activist
groups said a dozen and possibly as many as 45 people, including
children, died overnight. Activist videos posted online purported to
attest to the killing and mutilation of children, and at least six dead
adults were shown covered with sheets and blood-stained blankets.
But,
in a counterclaim reflecting a propaganda war accompanying the bloody
crackdown on dissent, the SANA state news agency Monday accused “the
terrorist armed groups” of responsibility.
“The
terrorist armed groups have kidnapped scores of civilians in the city of
Homs, central Syria, killed, and mutilated their corpses and filmed
them to be shown by media outlets,” SANA said. “A media source asserted
that the footage of the corpses presented by some satellite TV stations
belong to the civilians, who were kidnapped by the terrorist armed
groups.”
The Syrian government routinely refers to its opponents, including armed men, army defectors and protesters, as terrorists.
The
conflicting versions agreed only on one point: that more civilians had
died, adding to the U.N. estimate of some 7,500 since the crackdown
began a year ago in what has become the bloodiest of the Arab uprisings.
Separately,
Reuters quoted activists as saying a car bomb exploded on Monday at a
school in the southern city of Daraa, killing a schoolgirl and wounding
25 others.
The continued bloodletting, including
heavy shelling reported over the weekend in the northern province of
Idlib, offered a grim backdrop to the just-ended mission of the peace
envoy, Kofi Annan, a former Secretary-General of the United Nations,
whose efforts to seek a negotiated settlement were endorsed by both the
United Nations and the Arab League.
As he left Syria, he said he remained optimistic about the possibility of an agreement, but he acknowledged the difficulties.
“You
have to start by stopping the killing and the misery and the abuse that
is going on today and then give time for a political settlement,”
Reuters quoted him as saying. “It's going to be difficult, but we have
hope.” — New York Times News Service