text: Covered bodies fill a mass grave reported to be in Dariya, Syria, where hundreds of people have been killed. (Shaam News Network / ) 
   
   BEIRUT — Bloodied bodies lay strewn in the streets, in basements and even in the cemetery in the besieged Damascus suburb of Dariya, site of what may be the largest mass killing to date in more than 17 months of fighting in Syria, according to opposition and pro-government accounts Sunday. 
   
   Video posted Sunday on the Internet purported to show groups of victims in Dariya being buried in a mass grave, a deep trench several yards long. 
   
   "We are finding bodies everywhere. What has happened in Dariya is the most appalling of what has happened in the revolution till now, what has happened in Syria till now," said an opposition activist who goes by the name Abu Kinan for security reasons. "The smell of death is everywhere." 
   
   At least 320 people have been killed in Dariya, a working-class town southwest of the capital, since the military launched an assault on the suburb five days ago, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based group opposed to President Bashar Assad. 
   
   The killings reported in Dariya contributed to a death toll Saturday that topped 400 throughout Syria, according to the Local Coordination Committees, an opposition umbrella coalition. It appears to be the largest single-day death toll reported to date in the conflict. The group reported more than 200 people killed Sunday. 
   
   The numbers could not be independently confirmed. The government has accused the opposition of exaggerating death tolls and inventing massacres in a bid to discredit the armed forces. 
   
   According to United Nations figures, at least 17,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in Syria since antigovernment protests broke out in March 2011. The opposition puts the death toll at more than 20,000. 
   
   Verifying casualty counts in Syria has become more difficult with the departure of United Nations monitors, who had visited some previous massacre sites and provided confirmation of the numbers killed and injured. With the U.N. monitoring mission over, there was little prospect Sunday of any independent investigation into the killings in Dariya. The Syrian government places severe restrictions on media coverage. 
   
   Opposition advocates blamed government troops and plainclothes militiamen for the killings. The government blamed "terrorists," its usual term for armed rebels. 
   
   The opposition says many victims in Dariya, previously a stronghold of rebels seeking to oust Assad, were executed after pro-government forces entered the town Friday. Others were killed in shelling or shot by snipers, the opposition says. 
   
   Opposition activists said many victims were taken prisoner by government forces and executed in basements. In one grisly discovery Saturday, more than 120 bodies were found in one basement, activists said. 
   
   According to opposition activists, more than 100 additional bodies were discovered Sunday as government forces withdrew to the town's outskirts and residents were able to begin searching more thoroughly. 
   
   Most victims were men, but many women and children were also among the dead, the opposition said. 
   
   Even the pro-government Syrian TV channel Addounia showed images of residents who had apparently been killed in the midst of seemingly routine daily activities. The station aired footage of a girl killed on a street, a man fallen from his motorcycle, and several bodies at a cemetery. 
   
   "As we have become accustomed, every time we enter an area that has terrorists, they have committed crimes and killings in the name of freedom," the Addounia reporter said in her report. 
   
   As the camera scanned behind her and got closer on a man shot to death in the driver's seat of a blue pickup truck, she added, "This is their doctrine and this is how they think." 
   
   The Addounia footage from Dariya that aired Sunday showed bloodied bodies on streets, in homes and scattered in a cemetery. Many victims appeared to be women and children. The members of one entire family executed in their home were shot because they didn't support the "terrorists," a soldier told the station's reporter. 
   
   On Sunday, the army returned to some Dariya neighborhoods that had been raided the day before, leading to the deaths of additional residents, said Abu Kinan, the opposition activist. 
   
   The government onslaught against Dariya began last week when regime forces began shelling from tanks, helicopters and fighter jets, according to opposition activists. It was the latest in what the opposition calls a methodical attempt to retake and punish rebel-held neighborhoods in Damascus and surrounding suburbs. The assault on Dariya and other suburbs followed an uprising last month that saw intense combat in many parts of the city. 
   
   The Syrian military eventually crushed the rebellion in the capital districts. The army then moved its focus to outlying areas such as Dariya. 
   
   After fighters with the Free Syrian Army, the rebel umbrella group, withdrew from the town Friday night, soldiers accompanied by shabiha militia members stormed in, opposition groups said. They raided homes and arrested many, taking prisoners to the basements of empty buildings where they were shot execution-style, according to opposition accounts. 
   
   Before Dariya, the opposition said, dozens were killed in Moadamyeh al-Sham, another Damascus suburb, and on Sunday military forces were reported to be moving toward the nearby town of Ajdaideh, the opposition said. 
   
   The pro-government Addounia channel, reporting on the violence in the Damascus suburbs, aired a surreal sequence in which a reporter, standing in the cemetery where fresh corpses were tossed about, announced the discovery of a woman shot but "clinging to life." The camera cut to a woman lying on the ground, her head resting on a shattered stone grave marker, her hands bloody from her wound. 
   
   "I was heading to Damascus with my husband and children and suddenly I found myself like this," explained the wounded woman, who said that her husband worked for state security and that she didn't know what had happened to him or her three children. 
   
   "Who hit you, ma'am? Tell us," the reporter said. 
   
   "I don't know," she said. "I don't remember anything, I don't remember, except that I was shot." 
   
   Once the brief interview was over, army soldiers arrived and took the wounded woman away on a stretcher. 
   
   A Times staff writer in Beirut and special correspondent Rima Marrouch in Antakya, Turkey, contributed to this report. ||||| UN chief leads world outcry over Syria 'massacre' 
   
   DAMASCUS — UN chief Ban Ki-moon demanded an independent inquiry Monday into the killings of hundreds of civilians in the Syrian town of Daraya as world outrage mounted over the "massacre" by pro-government forces. 
   
   Rebels from the Free Syrian Army claimed to have downed a military helicopter as they battled the army in a new front in east Damascus where a human rights watchdog reported at least 35 people killed, among them children. 
   
   France said it was working with allies on possibility of setting up buffer zones to protect civilians inside Syria amid growing concern about the plight of fleeing civilians camped out on the country's borders. 
   
   The UN chief was "shocked" by the reports of hundreds of bodies found in Daraya, a satellite town southwest of Damascus that was subjected to a five-day assault by pro-government forces last week, his spokesman Martin Nesirky said. 
   
   "The secretary general is certainly shocked by those reports and he strongly condemns this appalling and brutal crime," Nesirky told reporters. 
   
   "Where hundreds of civilians have been killed in Daraya, this needs to be investigated immediately in an independent and impartial fashion," the spokesman added. 
   
   The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that 334 bodies had now been found in Daraya after what activists described as brutal five-day onslaught of shelling, summary executions and house-to-house raids by pro-government forces. 
   
   The Sunni Muslim town of some 200,000 people is seen as a stronghold of opposition to the minority Alawite-led regime of President Bashar al-Assad. 
   
   Grisly videos issued by opposition activists showed dozens of charred and bloodied bodies lined up in broad daylight in a graveyard in Daraya, and others lying wall-to-wall in rooms in a mosque. 
   
   State media said the operation had "purified terrorist remnants" in Daraya, while pro-government television Al-Dunia said "terrorists" had carried out the killings. 
   
   -- 'Atrocity on a new scale' -- 
   
   ------------------------------- 
   
   The White House said the reports of the Daraya massacre were the latest evidence of Assad's "wanton disregard for human life." 
   
   Britain said it would be "an atrocity on a new scale" and the European Union said it was "totally unacceptable." 
   
   In a new front in east Damascus, rebels from the Free Syrian Army claimed to have downed a military helicopter in the Qaboon district, where activists reported shelling, heavy fire by combat helicopters and fierce clashes between troops and rebels. 
   
   State television said the aircraft crashed near a mosque. 
   
   The FSA had previously said it shot down a Syrian warplane two weeks ago in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor and captured its pilot, but the claims cannot be independently confirmed. 
   
   Heavy shelling and fierce fighting also engulfed the Jubar district of east Damascus as well as several towns outside the capital, the Observatory said. 
   
   The Britain-based watchdog said that nationwide a total of 148 people were killed in violence on Monday. 
   
   Human rights groups have accused the regime of committing many atrocities during the 17-month conflict and a UN panel said earlier this month it was guilty of crimes against humanity. It also accused the rebels of war crimes. 
   
   Activists say around 25,000 people have been killed since the uprising against Assad's rule broke out in March last year, while the United Nations says at least 200,000 people have fled to neighbouring countries and another 2.5 million are in need inside Syria. 
   
   Underscoring the growing humanitarian crisis, Turkey, which is struggling to cope with an influx of 80,000 refugees, said another 9,000 were now massed at the border awaiting for more camps to open. 
   
   Turkey has called for establishment of protected buffer zones inside Syria to receive people displaced by the conflict and prevent them flooding over the border and French President Francois Hollande said Monday that discussions were under way with allies on the possibility. 
   
   "We are working ... (on) the initiative of buffer zones proposed by Turkey," Hollande said, adding: "We are doing so in coordination with our closest partners." 
   
   Hollande urged the Syrian opposition to form a "provisional, inclusive and representative" government, adding: "France will recognise the provisional government of the new Syria as soon as it is formed." 
   
   But Washington cautioned against moving ahead too rapidly with a provisional government, saying more work needed to be done to ensure that it was broad-based and representative. 
   
   State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said that the United States was calling on the opposition "to coordinate more closely" with Syrians both inside and outside the country. 
   
   "We would want to ensure that that was based on a solid democratic plan and that it reflected a broad cross-section of those in Syria and reflected the values of inclusion, the values of human rights and protections for all groups," she said. 
   
   Some analysts have voiced concern that the opposition is dominated by Sunni hardliners who could seek revenge against Assad's minority Alawite community, threatening prolonged sectarian bloodshed. 
   
   Copyright © 2012 AFP. All rights reserved. More »
target: – A government helicopter crashed today in Damascus, with rebel groups claiming they shot it down. "It was in revenge for the Daraya massacre," a spokesman for the Free Syrian Army told AFP. A video posted online shows the burning helicopter falling to the ground, reports the AP. Syria's official news agency verified the crash, but did not provide details or confirm it was destroyed at the rebels' hands. Meanwhile, the toll from the Daraya massacre continues to rise, and has hit 334 by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights' count. The Los Angeles Times reports that video footage shows victims placed in a mass grave. "We are finding bodies everywhere," says one activist. "The smell of death is everywhere." August has seen 4,000 people killed, according to the Observatory.