Massacre in Syria

BEIRUT — Dozens of civilians were murdered in the strife-torn city of Homs, the Syrian government and opposition activists said Monday, as diplomats in New York and elsewhere struggled to forge terms for a possible cease-fire.

Each side in the Syrian conflict blamed the other for the latest carnage in Homs, which has suffered the highest number of casualties in the almost yearlong rebellion against President Bashar Assad.

Opposition advocates said security services on Sunday killed at least 53 people, all but six of them women and children. Many had their throats slit, the opposition said, and most were from the Homs neighborhood of Karm Zeitoun, where armed rebels have clashed with government security forces.

The official Syrian Arab News Agency in turn reported that “terrorist armed groups” in Homs had kidnapped and killed “scores of civilians,” mutilated their bodies and filmed the corpses.

The killers’ motivation, the state media said, was public relations: using the harrowing images in a worldwide campaign to blame Syrian security personnel for coldblooded massacre.

Syrian authorities have repeatedly accused the two major Arab-language satellite channels, Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya, of fomenting rebellion in Syria at the behest of the networks’ backers in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, respectively. The two Gulf kingdoms have spearheaded the Arab world’s political campaign to isolate Assad and have publicly called for arming Syrian rebels.

Gruesome images purporting to show victims lying in a blood-spattered room and on rubble-strewn streets appeared on the Internet, on the pan-Arab satellite networks and on Syrian state television.

The circumstances behind the latest killings remained unclear. But the grisly images provided a dark backdrop for the latest round of diplomatic wrangling.

Kofi Annan, a special envoy seeking peace in Syria, visited Qatar and Turkey on Tuesday after two days of talks with Assad in Damascus that yielded no breakthrough.

“These are grave and appalling reports of atrocities and abuses” in Syria,” Annan, former U.N. secretary-general, told reporters in Ankara, Reuters reported.

In New York, the current U.N. secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, called on the Syrian president to act within “days” on Annan’s proposals aimed at curbing the bloodshed.

At a meeting of U.N. Security Council members in New York, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called Assad “cynical” for receiving Annan even as his army was launching an assault on the northwest province of Idlib and “continuing its aggression” in the restive cities of Hama, Homs and Rastan.

The top U.S. diplomat indicated that Washington and Moscow still had major differences in their efforts to craft a diplomatic solution for Syria. Moscow and China last month vetoed a U.S.-backed proposal that would have called on Assad to cede power.

On Monday, Clinton appeared to criticize a new Russian initiative. Moscow’s proposal says nothing about Assad stepping down but mandates that both sides in the Syrian conflict withdraw their forces, subject to inspection by international monitors. Clinton drew a pointed distinction between Syrian government violence and “self defense” by civilians.

“We reject any equivalence between premeditated murders by a government’s military machine and the actions of civilians under siege driven to self defense,” Clinton said.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov conceded that Syrian officials bear “a huge share of the responsibility.” But the Russian diplomat disputed Clinton’s narrative of self-defense on the streets of Homs and elsewhere in Syria. Echoing the Syrian government position, Lavrov said that Syrian forces were battling armed militants, among them fighters affiliated with the al-Qaida network.

The continued differences between Washington and Moscow would suggest that a Security Council consensus on Syria may remain elusive. There is, however, broad support for Annan’s ongoing peace mission, though the special envoy’s efforts have yet to yield concrete results.