- Title: SYRIA: Video obtained by Reuters shows aftermath of Hazzano shelling
- Date: 24th August 2012
- Summary: VARIOUS CHILDREN PLAYING
- Embargoed: 8th September 2012 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: Syrian Arab Republic
- Country: Syria
- Topics: Conflict
- Reuters ID: LVA735FG3M9A68GST1LZTKSGGTEA
- Story Text: Video obtained by Reuters shows the aftermath on Thursday (August 23) of an attack by government forces on the village of Hazzano in Idlib province.
The video shows large craters and people searching through the rubble of destroyed houses.
"Where is Islam and where are the Muslims? We are being killed here, our homes destroyed and our women and children are killed. Where is Islam and where are the Muslims? This is one of the shells that fell in Hazzano village," said local one local resident standing next to a large crater.
The shelling has forced some residents, fearing for their safety, to move into tents on outer lying farms.
Elsewhere in Syria, troops and tanks swept into a town near Damascus on Thursday in an assault aimed at crushing opposition to President Bashar al-Assad in Syria's increasingly bloody civil war.
Artillery and helicopters hammered the Sunni Muslim town of Daraya, killing 25 people and wounding 200 over the last 48 hours, opposition sources said. Soldiers moved in and raided houses.
At least 100 people, including 59 civilians, died in violence across the country, according to the opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Some 200 were killed on Wednesday.
There was little resistance as Assad's forces pushed toward the centre of Daraya on the southwest edge of Damascus. Armed rebels had apparently already left.
"They are using mortar bombs to clear each sector. Then they enter it, while moving towards the centre," said Abu Zeid, an activist speaking by phone from near Daraya.
Assad's military had driven insurgents from most of the areas they seized in and around the capital after a bomb killed four top security officials on July 18. But rebels have crept back, regrouping without taking on the army in pitched battles.
Tanks and troops attacked the southwest Damascus suburb of Mouadamiya on Monday and Tuesday, killing 86 people, half of them in cold blood, according to Assad's opponents.
It is hard to verify such assertions due to state curbs on independent media. Syrian leaders say they are fighting "armed terrorists" backed by Western and Gulf Arab nations out to topple Assad for his resistance to Israel and the United States.
Foreign fighters from Arab and other countries have joined Syrian rebels, possibly including Rustam Gelayev, son of a late Chechen rebel warlord in Russia's Caucasus region.
Russian media and websites sympathetic to Islamist insurgents in the Caucasus reported that Gelayev had been killed in Syria, with some saying he had been fighting against Assad.
Russia's Kommersant daily, however, cited a relative of Gelayev as saying he had been studying in Syria, had decided to leave due to the violence and was killed on his way to Turkey.
In Syria's largest city, Aleppo, tank shells crashed into buildings in the rebel-held Saif al-Dawla district, even as displaced civilians came back to check their houses or pick up abandoned belongings.
A man in a dirty T-shirt and tattered sandals, who gave his name as Mohammed, said his home was in the nearby neighbourhood of Salaheddine, now back in army hands after days of fighting.
Aleppo, a once-prosperous commercial hub, is living through desperate times, divided by war, its streets stinking with rubbish and residents uncertain whether to flee or stay.
Rebel-held areas are at the mercy of army tanks, planes and helicopter gunships, with civilians now caught up in a conflict which Aleppo had mostly avoided until a rebel offensive in July. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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