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Crackdown Toll Seen as Syrians Bury Hundreds
(New York Times) Damien Cave - Residents of Daraya, a city of several hundred thousand, described how the Syrian Army first closed off the city, keeping civilians from fleeing, then methodically began a campaign of heavy shelling and house-to-house searches ending with executions. Up close, in the field where there were more bodies than people to prepare them for burial, gunshot wounds could be seen in the heads of many men. Abu Ahmad, 40, a resident of Daraya, said: "I saw dozens of dead people, killed by the knives at the end of Kalashnikovs, or by gunfire. The regime finished off whole families." In addition, the Local Coordination Committees said about 150 bodies had been discovered in the basement of a mosque. Experts say the counterinsurgency campaign by Assad's forces has increasingly centered on an effort to turn the population against the rebels by showing people the fatal consequences of harboring the opposition.