Pro-Assad show, ‘massacre’ mark Syria anniversary

Damascus: Huge rallies played up support for Syria’s president on Friday despite a new “massacre” report and a refugee exodus to Turkey as a deadly revolt against his autocratic rule entered a second year. International peace envoy Kofi Annan, meanwhile, demanded answers from President Bashar al-Assad’s regime before the UN Security Council re-enters the fray in a conflict which monitors now say has cost more than 9,100 lives. State television showed tens of thousands of people waving Syrian flags and Assad’s portrait in squares in Damascus, the northern city of Aleppo, Latakia on the Mediterranean coast, Suweida to the south and Hasaka in the northeast. The cities have been relatively unscathed by the deadly crackdown on dissent. Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, meanwhile, said 23 mutilated corpses were found near the protest city of Idlib in northwest Syria that was seized by regime forces this week. The victims had been blindfolded and handcuffed before being shot dead and the bodies dumped outside Idlib, it said, in an apparent repeat of a “massacre” of dozens of women and children in the flashpoint city of Homs last weekend. (PTI)