Syrian forces were accused Wednesday of having “executed” 15 civilians, as the office of envoy Kofi Annan said members of a UN observer team were evacuated from a tense town a day after a blast hit their convoy. “After regime forces raided the neighborhood of Shammas (in the central city of Homs), 15 civilians were found summarily executed,” Rami Abdel Rahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, in what he branded a “massacre.” The overnight killings came a day after regime forces were accused of another massacre in the town of Khan Sheikhun in northwest Idlib when they opened fire on a funeral procession and killed 20 people. Abdel Rahman said a 43-year-old Muslim cleric who had six children was among those killed in Homs. “Everybody loved this cleric, because he called for national unity,” he said. Six members of the UN team were forced because of blast damage to the car to spend Tuesday night with activists in Khan Sheikhun, which was under regime shelling, an activist said. Meanwhile, in his first interview in nearly half a year, President Bashar Al-Assad denounced the opposition Syrian National Council as both ineffective and working against their own people's interests. Assad also said in the interview broadcast Wednesday that his country has captured foreign mercenaries who were fighting for the opposition and is ready to show them to the world. In addition, he complained that Western countries protest the violence by his regime's forces but not by the opposition fighters. Assad said the Syrian National Council's call to boycott parliamentary elections this year discredited the group. “To call for boycotting the elections, that's the equivalent of calling for a boycott of the people,” Assad said in the interview, which was broadcast on Russian state news channel Rossiya-24. “And how can you boycott the people of whom you consider yourself the representative? “So I don't think that they have any kind of weight or significance within Syria,” Assad said in remarks translated into Russian.
