Epress.am News from Armenia
Syrian forces killed 111 people ahead of the start of a mission to monitor President Bashar al-Assad’s implementation of an Arab League peace plan, activists said on Wednesday, and France branded the killings an “unprecedented massacre,” Reuters reports.
Rami Abdulrahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 111 civilians and activists were killed on Tuesday when Assad’s forces surrounded them in the foothills of the northern Jabal al-Zawiyah region in Idlib province and unleashed two hours of bombardment and heavy gunfire.
Another 100 army deserters were either wounded or killed, making it the “bloodiest day of the Syrian revolution,” he said.
“There was a massacre of unprecedented scale in Syria on Tuesday,” said French foreign ministry spokesperson Bernard Valero. “It is urgent that the UN Security Council issues a firm resolution that calls for an end to the repression.”
The United States said it was deeply disturbed by reports of indiscriminate killing and warned Assad the violence must stop. Britain said it was shocked by the reports and urged Syria to “end immediately its brutal violence against civilians.”
Events in Syria are hard to verify because authorities, who say they are battling terrorists who have killed more than 1,100 soldiers and police, have banned most independent reporting.
Tuesday’s bloodshed brought the death toll reported by activists in the last 48 hours to over 200.
The escalating death toll in nine months of popular unrest has raised the specter of civil war in Syria with Assad, 46, still trying to stamp out protests with troops and tanks despite international sanctions imposed to push him onto a reform path.
The Observatory said rebels had damaged or destroyed 17 military vehicles in Idlib since Sunday while in the southern province of Deraa violence continued on Wednesday.
The United Nations has said more than 5,000 people have been killed in Syria since anti-Assad protests broke out in March.