At least 65 bodies found shot execution-style in Syria’s Aleppo

Rebels blame the Assad regime for the killings The bodies of over 65 young men and boys, all executed with a single gunshot to the head or neck, were found on Tuesday in a river in the Syrian city of Aleppo, a watchdog and rebels said. A Free Syrian Army [FSA] captain at the scene said at least 68 bodies had been found and that many more were still being dragged from the water, in a rebel-held area.
The bodies were found in the Quweiq River, which separates the Bustan al-Qasr district from Ansari in the south-west of the city, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
\"Until now we have recovered 68 bodies, some of them just teens,\" said Captain Abu Sada, adding that all of them had been \"executed by the regime.\"
\"But there must be more than 100. There are still many in the water, and we are trying to recover them.\"
A volunteer said as he helped load one of the bodies on a truck: \"We don\'t know who they are because there was no ID on them.”
At least 15 bodies could already be seen on the truck.
Abu Sada said they would be taken to the hospital at Zarzur where relatives could seek to identify them.
\"Those who are not identified will be buried in a common grave.\"
Fierce fighting continues between opposition forces and Syrian army forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The Free Syrian Army has meanwhile succeeded in seizing a central prison and key security post in Syria’s northeastern region after battling with state forces, a watchdog announced.
The Local Coordination Committees [LCC] -- an anti-government NGO -- said the opposition forces succeeded in seizing the central prison in Idlib following fierce battles with government troops on Tuesday morning.
In Deir Ezzor, the FSA claimed they secured an intelligence services headquarters, freeing dozens of opposition prisoners and leaving with large weapons caches.
According to the LCC, 15 people had been killed by government troops on Tuesday alone, most of them in the countryside surrounding Damascus.
Lebanese newspaper Al Akhbar has meanwhile quoted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as saying that his forces have \"regained the initiative on the ground and achieved important results, which will come to light soon.\"
\"Damascus is in a better situation,” he said. “Its strategic points -- despite all the militants’ attempts -- remain safe, especially the airport road.\" Assad also claimed that “closing Syria’s borders against weapons and smugglers could resolve the issue in two weeks.”
The remarks, relayed to the newspaper by \"visitors\" to al-Assad, also addressed the ongoing inaction by the international community.
\"The US is not ready for a solution, for the time being,\" Assad is reported to have said. Referring to Russia’s meandering support for the regime, the President said: “Russia is defending itself, not the regime in Syria.”
Assad reportedly added: \"We will not budge from the articles of the Geneva agreement,” despite international condemnation of war crimes committed on both sides of the Syrian conflict.
Meanwhile French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius has warned Syria risks falling into the hands of Islamist militants if opposition supporters do not do more to assist the 22-month uprising against President Assad.
Speaking at a Friends of Syria group meeting in Paris on Monday, Fabius said: \"Facing the collapse of a state and a society, it is Islamist groups that risk gaining ground if we do not act as we should.\"
\"We cannot let a revolution that started as a peaceful and democratic protest degenerate into a conflict of militias,\" Fabius said. \"We have to give the Syrian people a clear signal: we are on your side.\"
The meeting, which brought together Western and Arab nations along with the three vice-presidents of the coalition, tackled the lack of cohesion that has led to broken promises of aid and financial support.
Coalition Vice President Riad Seif warned \"time is not on our side.”
\"We need an interim or transitional government to provide assistance to millions of Syrians in liberated zones and to help bring the collapse of the [Assad] regime,\" he said.
\"The Syrian people are angry at the world’s dubious silence,\" Seif claimed. The SNC “can’t keep coming back empty-handed.\"
Fabius sidestepped the question of arming the rebels, underlining the West’s wariness about weapons spreading to Islamists across the volatile region.
Meanwhile, the United Nations warned it could be forced to cut already reduced food rations to hundreds of thousands of Syrians unless a huge cash injection is found, a top humanitarian official warned on Monday.
UN agencies have already cut the nutritional value of rations by a half over the past two months because of money shortages, UN humanitarian operations director John Ging said, ahead of a donors conference in Kuwait on Wednesday.
\"We are putting it squarely to the donors, more cuts are likely,\" Ging told reporters.
About four million Syrian rely on international assistance to cope with fallout from the long conflict in which the UN estimates more than 60,000 people have died. Many of them get daily food rations.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon will seek more than $1.5bn in new cash pledges at a donors conference in Kuwait on Wednesday. About $500m is required for operations in Syria and the rest for more than 650,000 refugees in countries around Syria.
Ging said that Syrians are now \"desperate.\"
\"We have already cut the calorie per kilo intake of rations by 50 percent over the past two months,\" he said.
With the UN and private aid agencies facing criticism from opposition groups over the allocation of assistance, Ging said aid workers were putting paper messages in the food rations to say that amounts had been cut because of funding shortages, not politics.
Some opposition groups have accused agencies of channelling aid money through President Bashar al-Assad\'s government. But Ging said \"not a dollar\" of UN money goes to the government.
Additional reporting: AFP