Twenty-three mutilated corpses were found on Thursday near a Syrian protest city seized by regime forces, monitors said, as the regime’s bloody crackdown entered its second year to a rising world outcry.
Human rights monitors said the victims had been blindfolded and handcuffed before being shot dead and their bodies dumped outside the northwestern city of Idlib, in an apparent repeat of a similar “massacre” in the flashpoint city of Homs last weekend. As the Syrian regime and the opposition continued to trade blame for the earlier killings, both sides organised mass demonstrations to mark the first anniversary of the eruption of anti-government protests in the city of Daraa, south of the capital, which was again the scene of deadly violence on Wednesday. “Twenty-three bodies with marks of extreme torture were found near Mazraat Wadi Khaled, west of the city of Idlib,” said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights in a statement.
It also said at least five others were killed in raids by security forces across the province of Idlib on Thursday and that violent clashes broke out overnight as rebels attacked army posts in the eastern region of Deir Ezzor. On Wednesday, 37 people were killed in violence across Syria, 20 of them in Daraa, the Britain-based watchdog said. Human Rights Watch on Thursday demanded an end to the “scorched earth methods” being deployed by President Bashar al-Assad and that China and Russia stop blocking UN efforts to take tough action.
