Syria massacre: residents tell of the death on the streets of Tremseh

The villagers in Tremseh spent the first hours of the attack in darkness, listening to a massive artillery bombardment and then emerged after dawn to find the streets littered with corpses, residents told the Daily Telegraph.

Families gathered around bodies of victims killed by violence that, according to anti-regime activists, was carried out by government forces in Tremseh, Syria 

"It began at 4.30am when first shells landed. I was sleeping and I woke up the sounds of explosions," said Abu Fares, a resident.

Power to the village had been cut the day before; all lights were out, mobile telephone batteries had drained and landline telecommunications were cut. There was no calling for help. Terrified, Abu Fares and the other residents stayed inside, crouching behind the most solid walls of their homes and praying they would not be hit.

"The shelling was too strong to go outside, we did not know what was happening there," he said. "After some hours everything fell silent. I went outside of my house. There was destruction everywhere and bodies under the rubble. Most of the houses were damaged or destroyed."

One of the video clips that emerged of Thursday morning's terrible events showed a young man wailing over the body of an elderly grey-haired man wrapped in a blanket and lying in the street.

"Come on, Dad. For the sake of God, get up," the man sobs. A boom is heard in the background. There was no way for the Daily Telegraph to verify the provenance of the video.

But by Friday morning activists, residents and Free Syrian Army fighters were claiming death tolls of between 60 to 200 people, most of them young men. Another video purporting to be of the one of the burials showed a shallow trench dug at least 20 meters long to a width of three bodies and lined with breezeblocks. The corpses filled the trench, lying side-by-side and wrapped in blankets taken from nearby homes.
"Families had sought refuge here from nearby villages that had been attacked in the past days. Today we buried 60 from our village, I don't know how many died from the others," said Abu Fares.
There are conflicting reports of what happened in Tremseh, a small farming village about 35km (20 miles) north-west of the city of Hama. It has a population of about 10,000 people, predominantly Sunni Muslims. Villages mostly inhabited by Alawites, the ruling minority Shia heterodox sect, surround the town.
Alongside those killed by shelling, reports have emerged of men that had died of wounds caused by gunshots fired at close range. There were unconfirmed rumours that others had been hacked to death 'by knives'. The Syrian government and opposition activists accused each other of summary executions following the initial shelling attack.
Whilst Syrian state television said 'armed terrorists' carried out the killings, referring to the rebel FSA, activists blamed the killings on paid government paramilitaries from the surrounding villages.
"The army surrounded the village with tanks and Armoured Personnel Carriers (APC's) from four sides and brought in busloads of soldiers," said Ibrahim al-Hamwi, a member of the Hama Revolutionary Council, speaking from inside Tremseh.
"I saw the Shabiha enter the city, they were entering houses and killed some men. They shot others in the street."
"People tried to flee the shelling by dirt tracks in the surrounding agricultural fields, these were the only areas not blocked by the government," said Mousab al-Azzawi, director of the London based Syrian Network for Human Rights.
"To the west, groups of Shabiha from the nearby village of Khafr Hod were waiting for them there. They had been expecting them to try and escape," he added. "They dumped them in the dried banks of the Orontes River that runs through the farmland."
Al-Hamwi said he hadn't visited the farmland site, but had seen the dead that his colleagues had collected from there; "I saw the bodies from that area. They had died from gunshot wounds. I am still helping to collect the dead, there are too many on the streets. We are bringing them to the mosque."
Some activists have claimed that women and children were among the victims of the killings, but no video had emerged documenting their deaths. Lists carrying the names of the dead were all of men.
A video showed a line of seventeen bloodied corpses that all young men, most wearing jeans and t-shirts. Most of the people killed were Free Syrian Army fighters that clashed with government troops inside Treimsa before attempting to flee, various activist news networks reported.