Syrian President Bashar Al Assad (centre) among his supporters during the inauguration of a memorial dedicated to university students who died during the ongoing civil war, at Damascus University, yesterday.
BEIRUT: Hundreds of Sunni Muslim families fled the Syrian coastal town of Banias yesterday after fighters loyal to President Bashar Al Assad killed at least 62 people overnight and left bloodied and burned corpses piled in the streets,
activists said.
A pro-opposition monitoring group posted a video online showing the mutilated bodies of 10 people it said were killed in a southern district of Banias, half of them children.
Some lay in pools of blood and one toddler was covered in burns, her clothes singed and her legs charred.
Pictures posted separately on social media by other activists showed piles of bodies of men, women and children dumped in stone alleyways.
The reports and images from Banias, a Mediterranean coastal town lying beneath green hills, could not be independently verified as the Syrian government restricts access to independent media.
The killings took place two days after state forces and pro-Assad militias killed at least 50 Sunnis in the nearby village of Baida. Activists said the Baida death toll was likely to rise to over 100 and possibly 200.
The US government said yesterday it was horrified by the report of the Baida massacre and said the Syrian government was stepping up violence against civilians.
The two-year-old uprising against four decades of Assad family rule has been led by Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority, and sectarian clashes and alleged massacres have become increasingly common in a conflict that has killed more than 70,000 people.
Minorities such as the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shia Islam, have largely stood behind Assad, an Alawite. They argue that they are protecting Syria from Islamist militants.
Others say they begrudgingly support the regime out of fear they would become victims of a Sunni backlash after more than 40 years of rule by Alawite-dominated elites.
Banias is a Sunni pocket in the midst of a large Alawite enclave on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, and activists in the area accuse militias loyal to Assad of ethnic cleansing.
Hundreds of panicked Sunni families fled Ras Al Nabaa in the south of Banias early yesterday after the night of violence, said Rami Abdelrahman, head of the monitoring group, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
“But now the army is turning people back at the checkpoints outside the town, telling them to go back to Banias, that nothing is wrong. There are also announcements going out on mosque loudspeakers telling people to return home.”
A video posted online by other activists showed a pile of nearly 20 bodies in Banias that they said were all from the same family. Several women and nine children were among the dead. REUTERS
