United Nations: UN observers in Syria described an attack on a village in the Hama region in which about 220 people were reportedly killed as part of a continuing Syrian air force operation, the UN mission said in an assessment obtained by reporters on Friday.
“The situation in Hama province continues to be highly volatile and unpredictable,” said the “flash report” from the UN observer mission on Thursday’s incident.
“SAAF forces continue to target populated urban areas north of Hama City in a large scale,” the report said, referring to the Syrian Arab Air Force.
Opposition sources said about 220 people, mostly civilians, were killed in the village of Tremseh when it was attacked by helicopter gunships and tanks then stormed by militiamen who slaughtered some families on Thursday.
“The operation in Tremseh is assessed as an extension of the SAAF operation in Khan Shaikhoun to Souran over the recent number of days,” said the two-page report by the UN mission in Syria, known as UNSMIS.
There were no independent accounts of the number of dead or how they were killed. If scores of civilians were killed, it could make it the worst atrocity in 16 months of fighting between rebels and the forces of President Bashar Al Assad.
According to the UNSMIS report, a patrol of unarmed UN military observers could get within only about 6km of Tremseh on Thursday before being stopped by SAAF commanders because of “military operations.”
The patrol observed the situation from a few different locations around Tremseh for about eight hours during which time it heard more than 100 explosions, sporadic small arms and heavy machinegun fire and saw white and black smoke plumes.
The UN observers saw one Mi-8 and two Mi-24 helicopters and witnessed one of the Mi-24 helicopters firing air-to-ground rockets.
“The patrol received several calls from local contacts claiming 50 people had been killed and 150 wounded within Tremseh,” the report said.
“Attempts to contact the local military commander during this period were unsuccessful,” it said. “Patrols attempted to access Tremseh via alternate routes without success.”
The report said the UN mission made further attempts to get a local ceasefire to allow the evacuation of civilians from Tremseh by contacting the Hama Governorate chief of police and the SAAF senior national liaison officer, but did not succeed.
Security Council Divided
The UN observers said they also saw several civilian trucks and cars moving through the area carrying armed men wearing a mix of military and civilian clothing and 10 ambulances, one of which was transporting an armed person.
UNSMIS was deployed to Syria in April to monitor a failed truce as part of international envoy Kofi Annan’s peace plan. The UN Security Council must decide the future of the mission before July 20, when its initial 90-day mandate expires.
In a letter to the Security Council on Friday, Annan said the massacre in Tremseh showed that UN resolutions on Syria were being ignored, making it imperative to signal that there would be consequences.
In a letter to the Security Council UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called it an “outrageous escalation of violence.”
He said in a statement later on Friday that the reports of a massacre by Syrian government forces cast “serious doubts” on Al Assad’s commitment to Annan’s peace plan, which Assad had reiterated as recently as Monday.
“I condemn, in the strongest possible terms, the indiscriminate use of heavy artillery and shelling of populated areas, including by firing from helicopters,” Ban said.
