UN team: Killings not civilian massacre

Killings in the Syrian village of Tremseh apparently resulted from a regime raid against rebels, not a deliberate massacre of civilians, U.N. observers say. "The [Thursday] attack appears targeted at army defectors and activists," observers from the United Nations said in a statement after they interviewed witnesses and observed damaged buildings. The preliminary findings sharply differed from claims by some opposition groups the Syrian military targeted only civilians in the small farming community roughly 22 miles northwest of the central provincial city of Hama, which regime forces bombarded in late July last year in what became known as the Ramadan Massacre that killed more than 200 civilians. The U.N. team did not confirm the number of people killed in Tremseh. But most of the 65 to 68 people identified so far were men in their 20s, most likely rebels from Tremseh and nearby villages affiliated with the Free Syrian Army, The Wall Street Journal reported after seeing casualty lists. U.N. monitors who visited Tremseh Sunday saw more than 50 homes either burned or destroyed, with "pools of blood and brain matter" seen in a number of homes, a observer team statement said. At a news conference in Damascus earlier Sunday Syrian Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdissi said the Tremseh violence was a military operation against armed opponents of the regime of President Bashar Assad. "What happened was not an attack on civilians," he told reporters, saying the use of heavy weapons against such a small area would have been impossible. "What has been said about the use of heavy weapons is baseless," he said, claiming the attack had killed 37 fighters and two civilians, figures much lower than opposition estimates. Activists initially said the death toll was above 200, but revised it downward to 103 victims, overwhelmingly young male adults. Makdissi said the Assad regime had every right to send troops to Tremseh to confront fighters he said had stockpiled weapons and ammunition to use for attacks on army checkpoints in the Hama countryside. He said initial reports of a civilian massacre and the strong reactions from U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sought to pressure Assad ally Russia into backing a proposed U.N. Security Council resolution this week that would impose tough trade and financial sanctions on Syria if it continued using heavy weapons against populated areas. "They wanted a vitamin boost to defeat the wise Russian endeavors in the Security Council," Makdissi said. A senior U.S. official told the Journal Sunday the Obama administration would "be interested in the full report from the U.N." The International Committee of the Red Cross declared the Syrian conflict an all-out civil war Sunday, a legal status that means the Syrian military and any associated militia groups, as well as opposition fighters, can be prosecuted for war crimes under international humanitarian law, The Washington Post said. Heavy fighting was reported in Damascus, Sunday, with activists alleging regime forces for the first time shelled rebel holdouts in the Syrian capital.