BEIRUT Rebel fighters in Syria have attacked a village in the country's east, killing dozens of Shiites. A Syrian government official denounced the attack, saying it was a "massacre" of civilians.
The killings, which took place Tuesday in the eastern Deir el-Zour province, highlight the sectarian nature of Syria's conflict that has killed more than 80,000 people, according to the U.N.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 60 people were killed in the village of Hatla in the oil-rich province that borders Iraq.
With a steady drumbeat from some U.S. and European politicians calling for the West to arm Syria's rebels, the composition of the rebel force on the ground is vital to understand, and the men who committed at least some of the killings in Hatla were not Syrian, and were not men who the West would want to arm.
In a video posted Tuesday on YouTube, a man shows the dead bodies of several Shiite Syrians in Hatla, and angrily calls on his fellow Sunnis to "massacre" their Shiite compatriots. The man speaking is not Syrian, he is Kuwaiti, and very few of the armed "rebels" seen with him in the video sound Syrian -- the accents are largely Kuwaiti and Iraqi. There were other, similar videos posted of the alleged massacre in Hatla.
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