40 killed in rebel attack on village in central Syria
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Extremist Islamic rebels who overran a village in central Syria populated by the Alawite minority have killed at least 40 people, activists said yesterday.
The report on the attack on the village of Maan in the central Hama province came as the Syrian Red Crescent was trying to get a ceasefire in the besieged city of Homs extended so it could deliver aid and evacuate more people from the area.
Half of the victims in the attack, which occurred on Sunday, were civilians, including women, while the other half were village fighters defending their homes, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Syrian state media described the attack as a “massacre” perpetrated by terrorists.
Islamic extremists, including foreign fighters and Syrian rebels who have taken up hard-line al-Qaida-style ideologies, have played an increasingly prominent role among the rebels fighting forces loyal to President Bashar Assad, who is a member of the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.
The extremists see Alawites as apostates who should be killed.
Rami Abdurrahman, who runs the Observatory, said Islamic fighters overran Maan after Alawite villagers lobbed mortar shells on the rebels using nearby roads. There have also been heavy clashes for weeks between hard-line rebels and Assad loyalists in the nearby community of Morek, Abdurrahman said.
A video uploaded by the rebels of the Jund al-Aqsa Brigade, which said it overran the village, showed them waving a black jihadi flag over the village rooftops as bearded, grinning men looted homes.
Jund al-Aqsa Brigade, however, did not claim the killings and no other extremist group in Syria did.
Khaled Erksoussi, the head of operations for the Syrian Red Crescent, said yesterday that there were about 200 families, mostly Christian, who wanted to leave two rebel-held districts of the city, which have been sealed off by Assad’s forces for more than a year.
A total of 690 people, mostly women, children and elderly men, have been evacuated from the rebel-held districts of Homs since Friday, when a UN-brokered truce went into effect, Erksoussi said. Aid workers also delivered food, medicines and flour despite heavy shelling that targeted the aid convoys.
“We managed to get some food and aid, but not the quantity we had hoped for,” he said, adding that the UN is talking to the government and rebels about extending the ceasefire.
He said 200 families had wanted to leave but could not reach the exit points before the 3-day truce expired yesterday.
“We are hoping the cease-fire will be extended and respected to get them out,” Erksoussi said.
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