BEIRUT — Syrian villagers described watching rebels advance on their homes, as mortars thudded around them. By the end of the August attack, 190 civilians had been killed, including children, the elderly and the handicapped, a human rights group said
BEIRUT — Syrian villagers described watching rebels advance on their homes, as mortars thudded around them. By the end of the August attack, 190 civilians had been killed, including children, the elderly and the handicapped, a human rights group said Friday in its most detailed account of alleged war crimes committed by those fighting the Damascus regime.
Human Rights Watch said the offensive against 14 pro-regime villages in the province of Latakia was planned and led by five Islamic extremist groups, including two linked to al-Qaida. Other rebel groups, including those belonging to the Free Syrian Army, a Western-backed alliance, participated in the campaign, but there is no evidence linking them to war crimes, the report said.
The new allegations are bound to heighten Western unease about those trying to topple Syrian President Bashar Assad and about who would take over if they were to succeed.
“It creates justifiable alarm that the opposition has been infiltrated and undermined by radicals,” said David L. Phillips, a former U.S. State Department adviser on the Middle East.
The Free Syrian Army distanced itself from the five groups identified by HRW as the main perpetrators, saying it is not cooperating with extremists. “Anyone who commits such crimes will not belong to the revolution anymore,” said spokesman Louay Mikdad.
Human rights groups have said both sides in the civil war, now in its third year, have violated the rules of war, but U.N. investigators have said the scale and intensity of rebel abuses hasn’t reached that of the regime.
The new allegations come at a time when the regime appears to be regaining some international legitimacy because of its seeming cooperation with a program to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile by mid-2014.
Human Rights Watch said it compiled a list of 190 civilians killed in the offensive, and that at least 67 of them were killed at close range or while trying to flee. There are signs that most of the others were also killed intentionally or indiscriminately, but more investigation is needed, the group said.
The rebels also seized more than 200 civilians from the villages, most of them women and children, and demanded to trade the hostages for prisoners held by the regime, the group said.
More than 100,000 Syrians have been killed in the conflict.
