More than 130 civilians were killed over the weekend by Syrian regime forces across the country, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights watchdog group:
The London-based Syrian Network for Human Rights watchdog said Sunday that 130 people had been killed in Damascus’ suburbs, Aleppo, Hama, Deir ez-Zor, Daraa, Homs, etc.
Meanwhile, the Syrian Local Coordination Committee said the Assad army had attacked in Aleppo with barrel and vacuum bombs and many homes were destroyed.
Also, the Syrian Local Coordination Committee said that fierce clashes took place between members of the Free Syrian Army and regime forces.
The Syrian government’s official news agency, SANA, claimed that Syrian troops “neutralized” a large number of armed groups in Aleppo, Idlib, Latakia, and in the suburbs of Damascus.
The reports will be read alongside figures estimating that more than 1,800 people have been killed in Syria in the last ten days, just weeks after Bashar al-Assad was sworn in to a third seven-year term.
Last week, the House Foreign Affairs Committee heard testimony from a Syrian defector who told lawmakers that more than 150,000 civilians are at risk of torture and death in Syrian jails. The defector, who appeared on Capitol Hill in disguise for security reasons, presented a collection of photographs taken in Syria, which, per the Daily Beast, catalogued “the torture, starvation, and death of over 11,000 civilians.”
The Wall Street Journal characterized the lawmakers attending the hearing as “stunned” at the images, part of a larger collection of approximately 50,000 photographs smuggled out of the country by the defector, a former military photographer.
International war crimes prosecutor David Crane called the photos “smoking gun evidence” of atrocities committed by the Assad regime, which Rep. Eliot Engel, the committee’s ranking Democrat, called “war crimes, plain and simple.”
Engel criticized the Obama administration for not acting sooner in Syria:
Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., who in March 2013 introduced the Free Syria Act which authorizes President Obama to provide “lethal assistance to carefully vetted members of the moderate Syrian opposition,” blamed the White House for not acting sooner.
“If we had taken that approach a year and a half ago, we may have been able to stem the growth of ISIS and weaken the regime of Bashar Assad,” he said.
Instead, Engel said America has failed in its pursuit of Assad.
“We had a responsibility to send a message to Assad that his criminal behavior would not be tolerated, but we didn’t,” he said. “Instead, here we are a year later, and we see new evidence of the Assad regime’s torture chambers and death squads.”
ISIS has in recent weeks made gains across Syria, and through the weekend battled Lebanese armed forces in the border town of Arsal, killing more than a dozen Lebanese troops and leaving scores injured.
[Photo: CBS Evening News / YouTube]