BEIRUT (AP) Syrian rebels rampaged through a Sunni village in the central province of Hama Wednesday, firing indiscriminately at civilians and killing 14 people, including seven women, state media and opposition activists said.
State news agency SANA said an “armed terrorist group” was behind the dawn attack on the village of Khatab, located 10 kilometers northwest of the provincial capital. SANA and Syrian state TV said 14 people were killed.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also reported the attack, saying the rebels accused the village’s Sunni Muslim inhabitants of “cooperating with the criminal regime” in Damascus. The group documents the violence in Syria through an extensive network of activists on the ground.
More than 160,000 people have been killed in the Syrian conflict and nearly a third of the population of 23 million has been displaced by fighting. A third of the dead are thought to be civilians.
Also Wednesday, members of Syria’s main Western-backed opposition bloc elected a new president, the Syrian National Coalition said in a statement.
The new head of the exiled opposition, Hadi Bahra, served as chief negotiator at the failed peace talks with the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad in February in Geneva. Bahra succeeds Ahmed al-Jarba, who has already served two six-month terms the maximum period allowed by the coalition.
The exiled opposition block hardly has any backing from people inside Syria. It only nominally controls nationalist-minded rebels that in many parts of the country been overrun by Islamic extremist groups, including the Islamic State group.
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