'It was horrifying beyond words': Syria mourns, and prays the ceasefire will hold

It took days for Alia al-Qantar to venture outside her home in the city of Sweida in southern Syria, after almost a week of fierce fighting led to hundreds of deaths. When she emerged, the scene was one of horror.

- Ruth Michaelson

After government forces withdrew from Sweida last week, people in the provincial capital described seeing bodies in the streets. The injured overwhelmed the local hospital.

"The bodies on the streets had been defiled, mutilated," said Qantar, a lawyer. "What happened was horrifying beyond words. I don't know how we're supposed to cope with all of this, the loss of so many and the scale of brutality."

Over the course of the day, along with other residents, she began to identify and bury the dead they found on the small network of streets that make up the city centre. Qantar feared more corpses lay in outlying villages.

Months of rising tensions between local Druze militias and Bedouin tribesmen spilled over into open battles across the Sweida province last week, inflamed by the arrival of security forces loyal to the fledgling administration in Damascus.

In the first five days of fighting, the Syrian Network for Human Rights recorded at least 321 killed and 436 wounded amid reports of sectarian abuse, shelling and extrajudicial killings, with numbers expected to rise.