Dozens of Bodies Found Near Damascus

The dead included eight members of a single family, including three children and their mother.

Dozens of bodies were found Saturday in a town outside Damascus that has been the focus of what activists described as a scorched-earth campaign by Syrian troops aiming to wipe out rebels and their sympathizers in several suburbs of the capital.

Forty to 50 bodies were found in the town of Daraya, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based group with a network of activists inside Syria. The town had already sustained heavy shelling, and bodies have been turning up there for days in the wake of army raids, leading activists to count more than 100 dead since Wednesday.