More Than 320 People Killed In Dariya,Syria

Covered bodies fill a mass grave reported to be in Dariya, Syria, where hundreds of people have been killed.

BEIRUT — Bloodied bodies lay strewn in the streets, in basements and even in the cemetery in the besieged Damascus suburb of Dariya, site of what may be the largest mass killing to date in more than 17 months of fighting in Syria, according to opposition and pro-government accounts Sunday.

Video posted Sunday on the Internet purported to show groups of victims in Dariya being buried in a mass grave, a deep trench several yards long.

"We are finding bodies everywhere. What has happened in Dariya is the most appalling of what has happened in the revolution till now, what has happened in Syria till now," said an opposition activist who goes by the name Abu Kinan for security reasons. "The smell of death is everywhere."

At least 320 people have been killed in Dariya, a working-class town southwest of the capital, since the military launched an assault on the suburb five days ago, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based group opposed to President Bashar Assad.

The killings reported in Dariya contributed to a death toll Saturday that topped 400 throughout Syria, according to the Local Coordination Committees, an opposition umbrella coalition. It appears to be the largest single-day death toll reported to date in the conflict. The group reported more than 200 people killed Sunday.

The numbers could not be independently confirmed. The government has accused the opposition of exaggerating death tolls and inventing massacres in a bid to discredit the armed forces.

According to United Nations figures, at least 17,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in Syria since antigovernment protests broke out in March 2011. The opposition puts the death toll at more than 20,000.

Verifying casualty counts in Syria has become more difficult with the departure of United Nations monitors, who had visited some previous massacre sites and provided confirmation of the numbers killed and injured. With the U.N. monitoring mission over, there was little prospect Sunday of any independent investigation into the killings in Dariya. The Syrian government places severe restrictions on media coverage.

Opposition advocates blamed government troops and plainclothes militiamen for the killings. The government blamed "terrorists," its usual term for armed rebels.

The opposition says many victims in Dariya, previously a stronghold of rebels seeking to oust Assad, were executed after pro-government forces entered the town Friday. Others were killed in shelling or shot by snipers, the opposition says.

Opposition activists said many victims were taken prisoner by government forces and executed in basements. In one grisly discovery Saturday, more than 120 bodies were found in one basement, activists said.

According to opposition activists, more than 100 additional bodies were discovered Sunday as government forces withdrew to the town's outskirts and residents were able to begin searching more thoroughly.

Most victims were men, but many women and children were also among the dead, the opposition said.

Even the pro-government Syrian TV channel Addounia showed images of residents who had apparently been killed in the midst of seemingly routine daily activities. The station aired footage of a girl killed on a street, a man fallen from his motorcycle, and several bodies at a cemetery.

"As we have become accustomed, every time we enter an area that has terrorists, they have committed crimes and killings in the name of freedom," the Addounia reporter said in her report.

As the camera scanned behind her and got closer on a man shot to death in the driver's seat of a blue pickup truck, she added, "This is their doctrine and this is how they think."

The Addounia footage from Dariya that aired Sunday showed bloodied bodies on streets, in homes and scattered in a cemetery. Many victims appeared to be women and children. The members of one entire family executed in their home were shot because they didn't support the "terrorists," a soldier told the station's reporter.

On Sunday, the army returned to some Dariya neighborhoods that had been raided the day before, leading to the deaths of additional residents, said Abu Kinan, the opposition activist.

The government onslaught against Dariya began last week when regime forces began shelling from tanks, helicopters and fighter jets, according to opposition activists. It was the latest in what the opposition calls a methodical attempt to retake and punish rebel-held neighborhoods in Damascus and surrounding suburbs. The assault on Dariya and other suburbs followed an uprising last month that saw intense combat in many parts of the city.

The Syrian military eventually crushed the rebellion in the capital districts. The army then moved its focus to outlying areas such as Dariya.

After fighters with the Free Syrian Army, the rebel umbrella group, withdrew from the town Friday night, soldiers accompanied by shabiha militia members stormed in, opposition groups said. They raided homes and arrested many, taking prisoners to the basements of empty buildings where they were shot execution-style, according to opposition accounts.

Before Dariya, the opposition said, dozens were killed in Moadamyeh al-Sham, another Damascus suburb, and on Sunday military forces were reported to be moving toward the nearby town of Ajdaideh, the opposition said.

The pro-government Addounia channel, reporting on the violence in the Damascus suburbs, aired a surreal sequence in which a reporter, standing in the cemetery where fresh corpses were tossed about, announced the discovery of a woman shot but "clinging to life." The camera cut to a woman lying on the ground, her head resting on a shattered stone grave marker, her hands bloody from her wound.

"I was heading to Damascus with my husband and children and suddenly I found myself like this," explained the wounded woman, who said that her husband worked for state security and that she didn't know what had happened to him or her three children.

"Who hit you, ma'am? Tell us," the reporter said.

"I don't know," she said. "I don't remember anything, I don't remember, except that I was shot."

Once the brief interview was over, army soldiers arrived and took the wounded woman away on a stretcher.

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Damascus Riddle-An Area Which The Syrian Forces Have Never Attacked

Nour Malas/The Wall Street Journal

Seen from Ain el-Fijeh, the Barada River Valley, outside Damascus, has become an opposition haven.

AIN EL-FIJEH, Syria—A short drive from downtown Damascus, where fighting surged again Wednesday between government and opposition forces, the rebel-held villages of the Barada Valley have been puzzlingly quiet.

For decades, Damascus families sheltered from the summer heat at the riverview restaurants of Ain el-Fijeh, a village just 15 miles up a mountain road from the capital. Now, the entrance to the village's municipal building has been painted with the design of Syria's rebel flag. Government office blocks bear graffiti reading "Independent Ain el-Fijeh." Opposition fighters train in nearby orchards.

In Ain el-Fijeh, several villagers wonder if they will be next—and, if not, why regime forces haven't returned since earlier attacks.For weeks, residents of Ain el-Fijeh have listened to the near-daily shelling of Zabadani, a town about nine miles away. On Wednesday, fighting raged in the other direction, too, as Damascus residents said Syrian government tanks and helicopters attacked the capital's southern neighborhoods of Kafar Souseh and Nahr Aisha. At least 43 people were killed in the shelling and mortar attacks, activist groups said, including 24 men in Kafar Souseh who activists said appeared to have been shot in the head.

Many in this village, home to 6,000 people, say local rebels outfoxed the government. Regime forces dispatched tanks and armored vehicles twice against Ain el-Fijeh earlier this year after residents began taking up arms, residents say. But government troops aborted their last attempted attack, in April, as local fighters consolidated control over a pumping station that sends drinking water from Fijeh's ancient spring to Damascus, say residents and the rebels who control the spring.

It isn't clear whether the government took any threat to the capital's water supply seriously; more skeptical locals believe the government will fight opponents here sooner or later.

The enclave's existence has many residents wondering about the Syrian military's strategy and strength against opposition forces. In ceding control in this area, while bigger fights rage in Aleppo and Damascus, the regime appears to have given the opposition the space to turn the 14 villages of the surrounding Wadi Barada, or the Barada River Valley region, into a haven.

"We have boycotted the state completely here," a 28-year-old defected first lieutenant who leads the Wadi Barada Military Council said in Deir Qanoun, another village in the valley, which has about 90,000 residents in all. "We don't pay for electricity anymore. Cars don't pay registration. We still get all services," said the lieutenant, known to people here as Abu Zein, or Zein's father.

The mountains between Damascus and the Lebanon border have been bitterly contested between government and rebel forces. The regime has continued to make incursions into nearby Zabadani after it briefly fell to local fighters in January, rebel fighters say. These fighters allege the town lies along a transit route for weapons between the Syrian regime and its ally Hezbollah, the militant and political group, in Lebanon. Syria's government denies trading weapons with Hezbollah.

But regime forces have lost control of other nearby towns, including in the Barada valley.

The Syrian military hasn't deployed its full capability in and around Damascus, military analysts and several observers say. The military barely used its tank arsenal to fight the boldest rebel attack on the capital last month, according to United Nations monitors in Syria whose mission expired last week.

Some monitors who had visited Damascus conflict zones noted a strategy of bombardment from afar—relying more on machine-gun attacks from helicopters or long-range tank guns, rather than sending troops to fight. That, they said, could suggest a dearth of reliable soldiers to staff ground operations as the government's elite, loyalist units have been spread across the country.

Some rebels argue government forces may have a strategy of neglect in these areas—periodically prodding towns that first rose in peaceful protest until their residents militarize, and then turning a blind eye while they become hubs for fighters that the military can later stamp out.

Joined by rocky mountain roads and lush apple and peach orchards, Wadi Barada's villages are populated mainly by members of Syria's Sunni Muslim majority. Ain el-Fijeh and other villages here erupted in early protests last year against President Bashar al-Assad's regime.

Local elders mediated with the security forces, leaving the townspeople to protest freely until that June, when, residents say, government forces started to open fire on protests. In response, men picked up their hunting rifles and women hurled stones at tanks, several residents said.

The first fatality here was Fatima Nasrullah, a mentally handicapped woman in her 30s. She was shot as she stood on her balcony throwing pebbles at a tank column on the street, residents say.

By January, residents here had started to help smuggle weapons in from Lebanon to the Damascus suburbs, and sent 300 men to help fight in Zabadani.

"After this, we were in the eye of the storm," said a young engineer, now a trainee with the local rebel council.

In February, after a six-hour battle with government forces, rebels claimed control of the Fijeh spring. General Mohammad Dib Zeitoun, Syria's head of political security, intervened to ask rebels to put guards at the spring infrastructure, three rebel leaders said.

The rebels agreed, and let a member of the security forces stand guard at the main spring source. When troops attacked the concrete pump building in March, the locals expelled the security agent.

"Honestly, we simply asked him to leave," said Abu Zein, the rebel commander.

Rebels say they didn't cut the water to the capital because they didn't want to harm the population.

Now, locals can be heard cursing President Assad on the streets and in line at the vegetable market, often to the surprise of the many families taking refuge here from other hot spots around Damascus.

Puzzled by the regime's apparent inattention but anticipating an attack if the battle for Aleppo fizzles, fighters here say they keep their activities secret even from family members. They sneak away to orchards they have turned into training grounds, where they say they have been joined by fighters from Damascus.

Abu Zein and two other fighters pointed out what they said were government sniper positions in the next mountain range, toward Lebanon. Gunshots echoed. The fighters said the rounds weren't from snipers, but from some two dozen rebels drilling in the orchards.

A young mother sat facing the trio, her 6-year-old daughter grabbing at her leg. Hearing for the first time that her lifelong neighbors—one a handyman, the other a salesman—are leaders with the local rebel military council, she pleaded with them to better organize themselves.

"You must fight harder," she said. Invoking what village residents call their first martyr, she added: "For poor Fatima's lost soul."

The men nodded. Their first advance on Damascus was poorly planned, they admitted, saying they learned about it at the last minute. Abu Zein also promised to balance the destruction of fighting with the revival of their village, once a popular tourist spot. "We will bring this place back," he said. "For now, we are just waiting to see what the war will bring."

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