© The Associated Press/Rodrigo AbdA boy stands in front of a shop destroyed by Syrian army shelling in the center of Idlib on Monday.
The Local Coordination Committees, an opposition group, said that the bodies of 64 men were taken to the National Hospital in Homs and that an unknown number of women and children who had been with them are missing. Activists said they thought that the men had been trying to flee the violence with their families when they were stopped and gunned down by security forces.
The details available were murky, however, and the bodies had not been identified, making it difficult to establish exactly how or why the men died.
The discovery came as Syria's state media announced that a big majority of Syrians had voted to approve a new constitution that would allow Assad to remain in power until 2028. U.S. and European leaders have condemned the exercise as meaningless, since it seemed designed primarily to ensure Assad's survival rather than to implement genuine reforms.
The apparent mass killing in Homs spoke to the rising ferocity of the violence engulfing many parts of Syria as the government seeks to quell the revolt and the once-peaceful protest movement increasingly resorts to arms to resist the onslaught, stirring fears of a civil war that could ignite a wider regional conflict.
Comment: To get a better picture of what's really going on in Syria, please read the Sott Focus "Syria's Bloody CIA Revolution - A Distraction?"