BEIRUT — The Syrian regime and rebel opposition forces Sunday traded accusations of blame for a “massacre” of at least 10 people in the town of Tal Kalakh in the south of the conflict-ridden country. “Last night, terrorists committed a new massacre against peaceful citizens in the city of Tal Kalakh in the Homs countryside, storming the Burj neighborhood and killing a number of citizens, including women and children,” state news agency SANA reported. The agency said “terrorists,” the term by which the Damascus regime and official media refer to rebel forces, had also looted homes and shops. “An official source said that the terrorist group stormed the Burj neighborhood and killed 10 people, most of them children and women, before one of the units from our armed forces intervened,” the agency added. Activists pointed the finger of blame at government forces. “The bodies of 11 people, including eight women, were recovered after they were executed during a raid by regime forces in the Burj neighborhood of Tal Kalakh today, according to activists in the area,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights watchdog said. Tal Kalakh, near Syria's border with Lebanon, was among the first Syrian towns to rise up against the regime of President Bashar Al-Assad in 2011, and regime forces have laid siege to it several times. Meanwhile, state media quoted an oil ministry official as saying that the rebels have set three oil wells in the east of the country ablaze, causing a daily loss of nearly 5,000 barrels of oil and 52,000 cubic meters of gas. SANA said the damage to the oil wells in Deir Al-Zor province, much of which is in rebel hands, followed disputes among the fighters over “sharing out the stolen oil” from fields in areas they control. It said Syria's Furat Petroleum Corporation was working to extinguish the three fires. A total of nine wells had been set on fire by the rebels, the agency added, without saying when the other six had been set ablaze. Fierce fighting, meanwhile, has sparked an exodus from the northern Aleppo district of Sheikh Maqsud, the observatory said. — Agencies
