A BBC reporter traveling with the unarmed observers in a convoy from the capital, Damascus, said an advance team reached Qubair and was checking the security situation before the rest of the monitors could enter the village to investigate the reported massacre.
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Syrian crackdown: Protesters opposed to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have faced violent responses from security forces.
A look at the Syrian uprising one year later. Thousands of Syrians have died and President Bashar al-Assad remains in power, despite numerous calls by the international community for him to step down.
According to opposition activists and survivors, government-backed militiamen known as shabiha attacked the Sunni village in Hama province on Wednesday, slaughtering at least 78 people in their homes. Survivors said the attackers were from three neighboring pro-government villages populated by members of President Bashar al-Assad’s minority Alawite sect.
The government has blamed “terrorists” for the attack, in which it says nine people were killed.
Earlier Friday, Syrian forces resumed their shelling of a rebel stronghold in the city of Homs, a day after world leaders sought to apply new pressure on the Assad government.
Activists and human rights groups said the neighborhood of Khaldiyeh in the central Syrian city came under artillery fire Friday morning.
With Syria lurching closer to sectarian warfare, world leaders on Thursday said the Assad government showed no sign of honoring cease-fire agreements or halting the slaughter of noncombatants, but they remained divided on how to revive a peace process that U.N. officials conceded is in ruins.
As new details emerged of the latest massacre of civilians, U.N. officials spoke for the first time of unspecified “consequences” for the Syrian government. Yet the refusal by Russia and China to embrace new economic sanctions meant that the world body was left without a clear path forward.
“Pressure — substantial pressure — is what this crisis demands,” U.N. special envoy Kofi Annan said during a closed meeting of the U.N. Security Council, according to a diplomat who attended the session. “We will soon reach a day when it will be impossible to keep the crisis from spiraling out of control.”
The warnings came less than 24 hours after news broke of the second mass killing of Sunni civilians in as many weeks.
According to a video interview in Arabic with a woman who said she survived the massacre, shabiha militiamen backed by Syrian soldiers arrived at Qubair in three buses and a tank and began shelling her family farm. The video was posted Friday on the Web site of Britain’s Guardian newspaper.
The woman, identified only as Mrs. Lathat, said the attackers destroyed the family’s home and vehicles, stabbed two of her daughters to death and burned their bodies.
“There was a tank with them,” she said, according to a Guardian transcript. “They began to shoot against the houses and burned them. They killed the children using knives. They surrounded the old men and stabbed them. People said that the shabiha came from Assila, Twain and Telsikeen villages.” She referred to neighboring pro-government villages.
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