Halfaya Massacre: Bashar al-Assad’s Forces Target Bakery With Air Strike, Kill Dozens of Syrians [Extremely Graphic]

The Guardian:

Dozens of people have been killed in an air strike on a bakery in Syria’s central Hama province, activists claim, with some reporting up to 200 dead.

“There is no way to really know yet how many people were killed. When I got there, I could see piles of bodies all over the ground. There were women and children,” said Samer al-Hamawi, an activist in the town of Halfaya, where the strike hit. “There are also dozens of wounded people”

Halfaya was seized by rebels last week as part of a campaign to push into new territories in the 21-month-old revolt against President Bashar al-Assad,

Another activist said residents picking through the bodies were still determining which were wounded and which were dead.

Hamawi, who spoke via Skype, uploaded a video of the scene, which showed dozens of dust-coated bodies lined up near a pile of rubble by a concrete building, its walls blackened.

The sounds of people screaming could be heard in the video (warning: graphic images), as men rushed to the scene on motorcycles and other residents limped away from the area. The authenticity of the video could not be immediately verified. The government restricts media access in Syria.

Activists said more than 1,000 people had been queuing at the bakery. Shortages of fuel and flour have made bread production erratic across the country, and people often wait for hours to buy bread.

Hamawi said: “We hadn’t received flour in around three days so everyone was going to the bakery today, and lots of them were women and children. I still don’t know yet if my relatives are among the dead.”