Hello and welcome to NewsHour. It's coming to you live from the BBC World Service studios in central London. I'm Tim Franks.

The mass killings this month in Syria raised two big questions. First, whether the new Islamist government can deliver justice and stop the country from descending

into another vortex of violence. The second is how the rest of the world can support the

reconstruction of this war-ravaged nation while holding its new leadership to account.

On that, a European Union-led donor conference is taking place in Brussels today, with Western countries, Arab countries and the new Syrian authorities attending. We'll be hearing more about that in a moment.

First, though, our Syria correspondent Lena Sinjab has had exclusive access to some of the places where massacres took place when remnants of the Assad regime ambushed and killed dozens of security officers from

the new government. And then what followed from forces loyal to the new authorities with

brutality, hundreds of civilians being killed, including women and children, many of them

Alawites, a minority sect perceived by some in Syria, still to support the former President

Bashar al-Assad.

Lena begins a report from an al-a-white village south of Latakia.

A mother weeping, the loss of her 22-year-old son, Habib, was shot dead.

Susanna Yusuf describes to me the moments her son was killed.

On Friday, he told me that there are bullets everywhere around them.

They are surrounding them.

Pray for me, mother.

Why did they kill them?

What did my son do?

He never touched a weapon. He has nothing to do with the previous regime.

Susanna also lost her sister and two other members of her own family. The violence last week was prompted when remnants of the Assad regime killed government security officers. Retaliation was swift and indiscriminate.

Hundreds of Al-O-Wites were murdered.

The majority of them, civilians, families in their homes.

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