The New York Times reports: Mass burials in this Damascus suburb on Sunday showed the carnage of the past few days in gruesome detail: scores of bodies lined up on top of each other in long thin graves moist with mud.

A video of what activists described as the fifth grave to be filled showed two small children near the edge. Up close, in the field where there were more bodies than people to wash and prepare them for burial, the scent of decay swirled and gunshot wounds could be seen in the heads of many men.

“The Assad forces killed them in cold blood,” said Abu Ahmad, 40, a resident of Daraya, where the Syrian government has waged a campaign it described as a “cleansing.” “I saw dozens of dead people, killed by the knives at the end of Kalashnikovs, or by gunfire. The regime finished off whole families, a father, mother and their children. They just killed them without any pretext.”

Several other witnesses here and two activist groups have now offered accounts of what has begun to look like one of the deadliest and focused short-term assaults by the Syrian military since the uprising started nearly 18 months ago. Residents described how the Syrian Army first closed off the town, keeping civilians from fleeing, then methodically began a campaign of heavy shelling and house-to-house searches.

Even as many of the details are still difficult to verify or determine — the exact number killed, how many were executed or died from shelling — evidence of what activists described as a massacre continues to mount.

The death toll, rising all week, grew again on Sunday. A day after two activist networks, the Local Coordination Committees and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said that more than 200 bodies had been found in the town, activists said another 15 bodies were discovered in the basement of a home in the area. That put the death toll for the week at more than 630 in the city, said the Local Coordination Committees, including 300 people reported executed. [Continue reading…]

Sinan Ulgen writes: Syria used to be the poster child for Ankara’s “zero problems with neighbors” policy. At the peak of their rapprochement, Turkey and Syria were holding joint cabinet meetings and talking about spearheading a common market in the Middle East. Then the Arab wave of reforms reached Damascus. The relationship turned hostile as the Syrian leadership resisted reforms and engaged in large-scale massacres to subdue the opposition.

With the support of Prime Minister Erdogan, Turkey’s foreign minister Davutoglu positioned Ankara in the vanguard of the community of nations seeking regime change in Syria. Thus Ankara gave support to the Syrian National Council and harbored the Free Syrian Army. Even when former UN secretary-general Annan’s plan for a political settlement was announced, the Turkish leadership made it clear that there could be no solution with Assad in power.

With this policy of direct confrontation, Ankara not only strove to obtain the moral high ground. It also sought to precipitate the fall of Assad while building a relationship with the future leadership of Syria by heavily investing in the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Syrian National Council.

Today, this policy of forcefully pushing the regime change agenda in Syria is under criticism domestically as some of the risks of a post-Assad world are becoming clearer.

The fear in Turkey is of Syria’s disintegration into ethnically and religiously purer ministates, with a Kurdish entity in the north, an Alawite entity in the west and a Sunni entity in the rest. The Kurdish opposition’s recent unilateral power grab in northeastern Syria rekindled Turkish concerns about the emergence of an independent Kurdish entity linking the north of Iraq to the north of Syria.

The right policy response to this threat would certainly have been for the Turkish body politic to finally and permanently address Turkey’s own Kurdish problem. But the Justice and Development Party (AKP) leadership’s prevailing populist tendencies seem to preclude this option despite a well-intentioned effort undertaken before the 2011 elections. The fact that even the highly popular AKP, facing no imminent threat to its rule, backed away from tackling this complex issue does not bode well for the prospects of a lasting settlement. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: With Syria’s second city, Aleppo, consumed by violence, war has returned with a vengeance to its capital. But in Damascus, the regime, rather than rebel groups, is on the attack. The summer offensive that rebel leaders envisaged is, so far, not going to plan.

Nationwide, the intensity of violence and number of dead and wounded is now at its highest level since the uprising began more than 18 months ago. Western officials, activists and rights groups estimate that close to 5,000 people have died during the past month alone. “It was a good Ramadan for the regime,” said one western official. “If you can call 5,000 dead people good.”

In Aleppo, savage fighting along several front lines is claiming around 30-60 victims per day, including government soldiers. The city looks and feels abandoned. Most citizens who live in the rebel-held eastern half have either left, or have bunkered down in their homes, where few supplies are reaching them from regime-held areas to the south.

Siege is crippling the opposition areas of the city. And a well-chronicled withering rain of shells from tanks and jets is wearing down both fighters and the few residents who have remained.

As Aleppo has been burning, however, Damascus has also re-ignited, but with much less attention.

The rebel insurrection in the capital, which struck fear into the heart of the regime from 18 July, with the killing of three security chiefs, was put down by loyalist forces around 10 days later, and does not at present appear to have lived up to expectations.

The assault on the capital had led to large numbers of desertions and defections and sharply bolstered rebel morale in other areas of the country, especially in Aleppo where the charge was led by forces who had rapidly ousted loyalists from security bases in the hinterland.

For the first time since the start of the uprising, the regime had appeared rattled. Its inner sanctum, watertight for four decades, started to creak and the number of defectors or deserters from Syria’s 300,000-strong army is believed by Turkish and western observers to have topped 50,000.

Since then attacks on rebel strongholds in Damascus have intensified and the opposition’s capacity to counter them seems to have tapered off.

“We don’t know what’s going on in Damascus,” said one rebel leader in Aleppo this week. “All we know is that there’s a big fight happening here.”

While rebel forces have shown more of an ability to co-ordinate operations – the summer offensive on the two leading cities is a case in point – they remain unable to make effective use of the officers who held command and control positions in the regime army and who have since sided with them.

“These officers cross the border into Turkey and then we don’t see them again,” said Sheikh Tawfiq Abu Sleiman, who commands a Free Syria Army unit in northern Aleppo. “They never come back to the battlefield to join us. And even if they did, many people here would not accept them.”

Neither are defecting soldiers on the Aleppo battlefield being used as reinforcements. “They go to Turkey,” said Radwan Surmeidi, a rebel who had just received three regime defectors last weekend. “They don’t join us straight away. And maybe never.”

The rebel forces’ inability to receive reinforcements is not helping them against a standing military that continues to outman and outgun them. Nor are new weapons coming their way, after the flush of guns and bombs taken in raids on regime depots abandoned by fleeing forces in late-July.

A trickle of assault weapons and ammunition comes over the border from Turkey, with the help of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkish intelligence officials. However, the heavy weapons that rebel leaders have been calling for, especially anti-aircraft guns, have not arrived. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: Scores of mutilated, bloodied bodies have been found dumped on the streets and on waste ground on the outskirts of Damascus in recent days, apparently the victims of a surge of extrajudicial killings by Syrian security forces seeking to drive rebel fighters out of the capital and its suburbs.

The scale of the current violence in Damascus eclipses the far-better-publicized battle that is underway for control of Syria’s commercial capital, Aleppo, in the north, where gains by rebel forces have enabled journalists to reach the front lines and where government artillery and aerial bombardments are causing most of the civilian casualties.

Activists say the Damascus killings reflect a new government strategy to deter support for the opposition Free Syrian Army by punishing and intimidating civilians living in areas under rebel control. Videos posted online and accounts from residents point to summary executions occurring on a scale unprecedented since the start of the 17-month-old uprising against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad.

According to the Center for the Documentation of Violations in Syria, which lists victims of violence who have been identified, 730 civilians have been killed in Damascus this month and 529 in Aleppo, a disparity that has increased over the past week as the bodies have piled up in the Syrian capital. [Continue reading…]

McClatchy reports: Austin Tice, a freelance American journalist who has contributed to McClatchy, The Washington Post and other media outlets from Syria, has been incommunicado for more than a week, his whereabouts unknown since exchanging email with a colleague.

Tice, a Georgetown University law student who served as U.S. Marine Corps infantry officer before leaving active duty in January, was one of the few foreign journalists to report from inside Syria as the civil war intensified. He entered the country in May and traveled extensively through central Syria, filing battlefield dispatches before arriving in Damascus in late July.

Tice’s reporting earned him a 2,000-strong following on Twitter, where fans of his work noted his disappearance when he stopped tweeting after Aug. 11 – when he’d recounted spending his 31st birthday listening to Taylor Swift music with rebel fighters from the Free Syrian Army.

His subsequent silence didn’t raise immediate alarm because he’d planned to leave that week, on a journey to the border that often takes days because of the fighting en route. The Damascus suburb where he was last known to have been has faced heavy bombardment in recent days, making communications difficult.

Tice’s family and colleagues are concerned for his safety and are asking anyone with knowledge of his whereabouts to come forward.

“We understand Austin’s passion to report on the struggle in Syria, and are proud of the work he is doing there. We trust that he is safe, appreciate every effort being made to locate him, and look forward to hearing from him very soon,” Tice’s parents, Marc and Debra, said in a statement from Houston, his hometown.

Tice’s editors said they were working with U.S. government agencies and Syrian intermediaries to retrace his movements. Colleagues praised Tice’s work, saying his experience as a Marine gave him particular insight into the capabilities of both government and rebel forces as the uprising spiraled into a civil war.