Syrian opposition activists said nearly 200 people were killed in a Sunni village on Thursday by government forces using tanks and helicopters, which, if confirmed, would be the worst in a series of massacres that have convulsed Syria’s increasingly sectarian uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.
The Syrian government also reported a mass killing in the village but said it was committed by armed terrorist groups, the official description for Mr. Assad’s opponents. It said at least 50 people were killed.
The site of the reported massacre, the village of Tremseh near the city of Hama, an epicenter of the 17-month-old uprising, was the first mass killing since United Nations cease-fire monitors were forced to suspend their work in Syria a month ago because conditions were too dangerous for them.
Activists in Hama posted a video on Youtube accusing the government of “ethnic cleansing in Hama,” and said the killings in Tremseh were “unlike any massacre that has previously occurred in Syria.” Tremseh is a Sunni-populated village surrounded by villages whose residents are of Mr. Assad’s Alawite sect.
Initial sketchy reports of a large number of casualties in Tremseh, first conveyed in a flood of Twitter postings, came as Security Council diplomats were meeting in closed session at the United Nations on drafting a new resolution to force Mr. Assad’s government and its armed antagonists to honor a cease-fire, allow the monitors to resume their work, and implement a peace plan by Kofi Annan, the special Syria envoy. That plan has been ignored despite repeated personal pleas by Mr. Annan to President Assad.
Reports by the Local Coordination Committees, an anti-Assad group in Syria, said many Tremseh victims were shot as they tried to escape the bombardments, and the group put the death toll at nearly 200. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based group with contacts in Syria, said that government troops “bombarded the village using tanks and helicopters” and that the total deaths exceeded 100.
Syria’s state television ran a serious of urgent bulletins across its screen attributing the high toll to clashes between the security forces and "terrorists," the government’s longstanding description of all opposition to President Assad. It said that security forces had arrested a number of suspects in the town along and seized significant weapons caches and that the weapons included some from Israel, another standard government accusation meant to imply that the violence is an Israeli plot.
Word of the Tremseh killings came as new fractures opened in Mr. Assad’s hierarchy. The first Syrian ambassador to break with him since the uprising began exhorted his countrymen to join the revolution, and he urged the armed forces to turn their weapons on what he called Mr. Assad’s criminal gang.
The statement by the ambassador, Nawaf Fares, who defected on Wednesday from his post in Baghdad and is now believed to be in Qatar, came as the Syrian government announced that he had been summarily dismissed and could face prosecution for actions that contradicted his duties to defend Syria. That was essentially a confirmation that Mr. Fares had joined Mr. Assad’s growing ranks of political enemies.
Mr. Fares was the second prominent figure in Mr. Assad’s government to abandon him in less than a week and the first to go public with a scathing denunciation. Manaf Tlass, a general in the elite Republican Guard, fled Syria a week ago but has not surfaced publicly, and it was unclear whether he had yet reached out — or would reach out — to Mr. Assad’s opposition.
“I declare that I have joined, from this moment, the ranks of the revolution of the Syrian people,” Mr. Fares said. “I ask the members of the military to join the revolution and to defend the country and the citizens. Turn your guns on the criminals from this regime.”
Mr. Fares also said that “every Syrian man has to join the revolution to remove this nightmare and this gang.”
His remarks, broadcast by Al Jazeera in a video statement and an interview, also denounced Iran, Mr. Assad’s only friend in the region. He echoed Western criticism of the Iranians for providing Mr. Assad with military and economic support.
“Iran is contributing to the problem, it is a cause of the problem, so how can it be part of the solution?” he said.
Castigating Iran’s religious hierarchy, Mr. Fares said: “Iran as a Muslim state should not at all stand with a dictator that massacres its people, no matter what its interests are. The interest of the Iranians is with the people and not with the regime.” Mr. Assad, he said, will eventually be gone, “but the people will remain there.”
In its statement about Mr. Fares, the Syrian Foreign Ministry said the ambassador had “made press statements that contradict the duties of his position of defending the country’s stances and issues, which demands legal and behavioral accountability.” It also accused him of leaving his embassy in Baghdad without prior permission.
Confirmation of his defection coincided with other reports of violence engulfing parts of Syria on Thursday, including what opposition activists in Damascus were calling the first government artillery bombardments of the suburbs of Kafar Sousseh and Qadam, and a relentless shelling of the city of Rastan, a rebel bastion where only 3,000 residents remain out of an initial population of 60,000.
Antigovernment activists also posted videos online claiming that Syrian forces had added unguided cluster bombs, an indiscriminate weapon designed to maximize damage and casualties, to their arsenal of attack helicopters, artillery and tanks.
The videos, posted earlier in the week and first highlighted by a blogger who uses the pseudonym Brown Moses, showed a pile of Soviet-era cluster bomblets lying on the ground with a canister used to deploy them. The videos were said to have been taken in the mountainous region near Hama, but the location could not be independently confirmed.
“These videos show identifiable cluster bombs and submunitions,” said Steve Goose, the arms division director at Human Rights Watch in a statement. “If confirmed, this would be the first documented use of these highly dangerous weapons by the Syrian armed forces during the conflict.”
Another video surfaced recently claiming to show a cluster-bomb strike this week around the southern city of Dara’a, the birthplace of the anti-Assad uprising in March 2011, but its location and timing could not be independently confirmed.
The new Security Council maneuvering for a resolution on Syria came a day after Mr. Annan, the special envoy whose peace plan for ending the conflict is paralyzed and at risk of complete collapse, had asked the Council to threaten the Syrian government and the rebels with consequences for failure to halt the escalating violence. He did not specifically ask for Chapter 7 sanctions, however.
Mr. Annan, who spoke to the Council by video link from his Geneva office after having visited Syria, Iran and Iraq, also said that Mr. Assad was open to the idea of an interlocutor between himself and the political opposition. An interlocutor presumably would allow a dialogue without the two sides having to talk to each other directly, laying the groundwork for a political transition as specified in Mr. Annan’s peace plan.
But a number of opposition leaders rejected that idea on Thursday. “Our position is clear, there can be no dialogue or negotiations, direct or indirect; there can be no transitional government until Assad leaves,” said Samir Nachar, a member of the Syrian National Council, the main opposition umbrella group. “We cannot dialogue with a criminal.”
Rick Gladstone reported from New York, and Neil MacFarquhar from Beirut, Lebanon. Reporting was contributed by J. David Goodman from New York, Alan Cowell from London, Dalal Mawad from Beirut and Hwaida Saad from Antakya, Turkey..
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