200 victims in Syria Alawite district: NGO

Beirut/Damascus: Up to 200 members of President Bashar Al Assad’s Alawite minority were injured or killed in an attack on their central Syrian village on Tuesday, activists said, while to the south rebels and state forces battled for the outskirts of Damascus.

Casualty counts varied for the attack on the village of Aqrab in Hama province, but several activists said they could confirm 10 dead. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the casualties came during a series of explosions in the town.

The Britain-based watchdog had earlier reported all 125 were civilians and that they had been killed or hurt by a string of bomb attacks. Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman later clarified that an unknown number of the victims were in fact fighters.

“Between 125 and 150 people were killed or hurt by gunshots and explosions in the village of Aqrab,” Abdel Rahman told AFP.

Aqrab is home to a majority of Sunni Muslims, but the neighbourhood where Tuesday’s violence broke out is majority Alawite, Abdul Rahman and activists said.

“The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights received a series of contradictory reports on events in the village of Aqrab, which is inhabited by a minority of Alawites,” the Observatory said in an email.

There were no reports on Syria’s state media.

Opposition activists posted videos on YouTube in which survivors said pro-Al Assad militias had used children as human shields in the village. However, the accounts could not be independently verified and the events remained unclear.

Syria’s upheaval, which began as a protest movement against Al Assad 20 months ago, has turned into a civil war which has now has killed more than 40,000 people. Sectarian bloodshed has previously hit both Hama province, where Aqrab is located, and neighbouring Homs province. Both witnessed massacres of hundreds of Sunni residents but Tuesday’s incident, if confirmed, would be the first known large-scale attack on Alawites.

An Alawite resident of a nearby village said the violence began in Aqrab when rebels attacked a checkpoint run by pro-Al Assad militiamen, known as shabbiha.

“We don’t believe there was a massacre but we think there are a number of hostages being held. Clashes began when rebels started shelling the shabbiha checkpoint,” he said by Skype. “ But now the phone lines seem to be down in Aqrab so that’s all we know.”

The circumstances of the attacks are difficult to verify independently as Syrian authorities tightly restrict the activities of journalists.

A rebel who said he fought in Aqrab told Reuters that fighters had surrounded a house with more than 200 people because shabbiha were there. The militiamen had used women and children as human shields and the house had been shelled by Al Assad’s forces, he said, without explaining why they would attack their own side.

Wounded children, apparently Alawites from Aqrab, appeared at an opposition field hospital in the nearby town of Al Houla, where they were interviewed by rebels in videos published on YouTube. Three young boys gave a similar account as the rebel, but did not say whether they were hiding in the house fearing government shelling or rebel attack.

“We were inside the house with shabbiha, they said they were protecting us from the rebels. The rebels started telling us come out, no one will hurt you. The shabbiha wouldn’t let us leave,” said Mohammad Judl, a young boy covered in a blanket, shivering as he was interviewed by an activist at the clinic.

It was not clear whether the boy was speaking freely.