BEIRUT—Syria's government, opposition and international diplomats traded blame Friday over a massacre that killed scores of people in a poor farming village, perhaps the deadliest in a string of attacks on the largely opposition-controlled countryside of central Syria.
All sides branded Thursday's daylong battle in the town of Treimseh a massacre. Yet clashing accounts of the number of dead, and who took part in the battle, underscored how the conflicting narratives of the country's battle remain hardened even when facts continue to emerge.
Tanks rained shells and machine-gun fire on the village of Treimseh for six hours Thursday before pro-government gunmen from neighboring villages moved in and attacked with guns and knives, said a resident of Treimseh and anti-regime activists from the city of Hama, about 10 miles away—a narrative that appeared to be confirmed in parts by video accounts.
Some activists who provided the first accounts of the day said as many as 200 people were killed in the farming village.
"I was deeply saddened and outraged to learn of reports of yet another massacre committed by the Syrian regime that has claimed the lives of over 200 men, women and children," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in a statement Friday. "Credible reports indicate that this unconscionable act was carried out by artillery, tanks, and helicopters—indisputable evidence that the regime deliberately murdered innocent civilians."
Late Friday, though, surviving villagers continued to comb through peach orchards and collapsed homes for victims. The number of dead stood at 74 on Friday, according to two local activists' tallies of confirmed names. The activists said they expected the number to double as they continued to clean and count bodies piled at the local mosque.
The victims' nature also remains unclear. Treimseh has been active in protests since the start of the uprising last year. It was host to some 250 antiregime fighters associated with the rebel Free Syrian Army—some of whom recently relocated there with their families after fleeing attacks in nearby towns—who fought with government forces for hours before the military withdrew, the resident and local activists said. These people didn't say how many of the victims were fighters and how many civilians.
Mrs. Clinton's statement on the number and nature of the dead was based on credible reports and U.S. government reporting, a State Department official said.
In the Syrian government's account of what it called the massacre in Treimseh, it was terrorists—a blanket term that state media often uses to characterize antiregime forces—who stormed the village, killing more than 50 people, including three state security personnel. It described the attack "as a bid to manipulate public opinion against Syria and its people and to bring foreign intervention in Syria on the eve of a U.N. Security Council session."
The accounts from Treimseh broadly echoed those of killings earlier this summer that marked an increasingly sectarian phase of Syria's conflict. The government blamed opposition gunmen for carrying out previous large-scale killings—in May in Houla, and in June in Qubair—saying these regime opponents had attempted to pin the attacks on the government in a bid to provoke international intervention in the country's crisis.
Many Sunni residents there say neighboring Alawites—from the minority Shiite-linked sect that rules Syria—are carrying out what they call a government campaign to reclaim towns that have fallen out of regime control and to purge the area's largely Sunni opposition.
Violence from both sides in Syria's conflict has escalated since a May massacre in the village of Houla, derailing a United Nations-brokered cease-fire. The U.N. Security Council continued talks Friday on rival resolutions drafted by Russia and Western states on Syria—continuing a standoff in which the U.S. has called, to Russia's objection, for President Bashar al-Assad to leave power.
"The Security Council should put its full weight behind…an immediate cease-fire and a political transition," Mrs. Clinton said. "History will judge this Council."
The Council is also expected to debate whether to resume or extend the work of unarmed U.N. monitors, whose work has been frozen by the violence. The mission' Council mandate expires next week.
In Treimseh, home to nearly 10,000 people, the resident said he had witnessed Thursday's siege and bombardment and spent much of Friday helping to bury 40 bodies in a mass grave.
"Today, it is quiet, but we are devastated," said the 25-year-old man, reached by international cellphone. He identified himself as the village's representative for the Syrian Revolution General Commission, the broadest grass roots activist network. He and three activists in Hama gave nearly identical accounts of the attack.
At around 5 a.m., they said, tanks and armored vehicles surrounded Treimseh from four sides before starting to spray machine-gun fire and artillery into the village. The opposition fighters began to mobilize and fire at the troops, these activists said. The attack lasted until about 11 a.m., when tanks, soldiers and security forces moved into the village.
"It became a street war," the resident said. "The Free Syrian Army couldn't fight that much, because they didn't have so many weapons."
Military forces withdrew at around 8 p.m., he and other activists said. People ran out to help the injured get to a field hospital about three miles away.
"It was bodies, bodies everywhere. We gathered everyone—dead, alive, injured—in the big mosque," he said. Thirteen bodies were pulled out of the river, as well as two injured people who said they had been dumped there by the pro-government gunmen, he said.
Activists from Hama said the Treimseh resident was one of a handful of people in Treimseh to inform others of events there late Thursday.
"At 9 p.m., I got the first [text] message from him. He wrote: They have destroyed us, my brother. They destroyed Treimseh," said the spokesman for the same activist network in Hama.
Videos filmed by activists emerged hours later. One appears to show a tank firing in the direction of a cluster of small homes, each surrounded by a concrete gate. Another shows 19 bloodied and charred bodies, all but one apparently male, and most in colorful T-shirts and jeans, lined up in a room, piles of flesh scattered on and around their bodies. One man's face is partly burned off.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a U.K.-based opposition group that monitors events in Syria, said that at least 30 of 50 people it confirmed killed in Treimseh appeared to have been entirely burned.
In a third video, a young man leans weeping over a body, named by the video's narrator as that of Mahmoud Ahmad Delleh, wrapped in a blanket. "Get up, Dad, for God's sake," he says twice, the sound of firing going off in the background.
Many people were killed when homes collapsed on them, the resident said. Others were met by pro-regime thugs—who he identified as Alawites from a neighboring village—as they ran to peach orchards outside the village, where they were killed.
The local activists said they feared the initial death tolls of 200—reported late Thursday by activists calling into the pan-Arabchannel al-Jazeera—were frantic, confused reports that could discredit their accounts.
"We're facing a real war," said the Hama spokesman for the Revolutionary Commission. "We don't need to make up numbers."
Other activists said most of those killed were male rebel fighters from nearby villages, and accused the opposition of exaggerating accounts "to prove that the regime is bloodthirsty."
Mousab Alhamadee, an activist in Hama with another grass roots group, the Local Coordination Committees, disputed accounts that rebel fighters picked a fight with government forces, or that government forces were rooting out fighters from a rebel stronghold.
"This is just an excuse for a new massacre," Mr. Alhamadee said.
"In all Syrian cities and towns, we have defected soldiers. Some of them are just defectors coming home to their families, not joining the Free Syrian Army," he said. "The regime is committing massacre after massacre without being held accountable for that, so it is just moving from village to village."
—Sam Dagher in Beirut and Jay Solomon in Washington contributed to this article.
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