TEL RIFAAT, Syria - Walid Blaw clutched a bed sheet filled with the body parts of relatives gathered from the rubble of their home after it was levelled at daybreak on Wednesday in an attack he said had been carried out by the Syrian air force. "I want to bury them, I have to bury them," he said, sobbing as dozens of people searched the rubble of the house in Tel Rifaat, a town near the border with Turkey and a short drive north of Aleppo, where rebels are fighting government forces. To cries of "Allahu Akbar", (God is Great), the volunteers used mechanical diggers and their bare hands to search the rubble. Sweating and panting, young men lifted heavy concrete blocks and made piles of debris, trying to reach the bodies of Mohamed Blaw, a mechanic, and his family buried beneath. Squatting and hunched over in the rubble, other men looked for pieces of bodies - fingers, hands and anything else they could find. They collected the remains by hand, gathering them in handkerchiefs for burial. Blaw opened the bed sheet he was clutching to reveal limp, charred hands and legs. He said four of the six people in the home had fled to Tel Rifaat from Aleppo in an effort to escape an ever bloodier conflict between Assad's administration and opposition forces seeking to end his family's 42 years in power. Three of the dead were children, he added. A Reuters journalist saw the body of a boy, aged around 10, pulled from the rubble. Wrapped in a blanket, his corpse was covered in dust and black soot. "This is Assad's democracy for you," said some of the onlookers, observing the salvage operation from surrounding rooftops. "I heard planes circling over our house. I was curious so I went to the roof top," said Walid Blaw, whose home adjoined the one that was destroyed. "I heard an explosion, then the plane came back over my head and the ground shook, the entire neighbourhood shook," he said. It was not possible to independently verify his account. The people killed in the attack had nothing to do with the rebellion against Assad, according to a neighbour who identified himself as Abu Mohamed. "This family never had anything to do with politics, never went to a protest and it has no sons fighting in Aleppo, and this is what happens to them," he said. "Just this morning I had greeted the old man who lived here at his doorstep." Rebels have said Assad's forces have been attacking rural areas in an effort to put pressure on those opposition fighters who have rural backgrounds. "The game that the Syrian army is playing now is to put pressure on civilians and the families of the Free Syrian Army to call them and to convince them to leave the front line," Sheikh Tawfik, a rebel commander in Aleppo, speaking to Reuters on Tuesday on the Salaheddine front line. "They are doing this by shelling residential areas and the rural neighbourhoods." Government forces thrust into Salaheddine on Wednesday, forcing rebels to retreat in fierce fighting. Back in Tel Rifaat, the rescue workers raised their voices over the din of the mechanical diggers as they gave orders to make room for the bodies.
