Rebels in Aleppo with captured policeman alleged to be a pro-regime militiaman Video has emerged from Syria which appears to show rebels executing regime loyalists in the beleaguered city of Aleppo. The men, allegedly members of the shabiha, or armed groups who have assisted in the

government\'s crackdown, are lined up and shot at point blank range.
The narrator in the video, uploaded to YouTube, says the men are from the Barri clan, whom the rebels accuse of murder.
Video posted by anti-government activists showed more than a dozen men, some with bloodied faces and torn clothing, who are said to be members or associates of the clan.
Held in what appeared to be a room at a school, they were made to state their names and accused of being pro-government militiamen known as shabiha. The man sitting in the centre, described as a leader of the group, said his name was Ali Zein El Abidin Barri, also known as Zeino.
The video depicting the apparent massacre has not been verified, though the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said such vengeance was a crime as Islamic law does not authorise the execution of prisoners.
Clive Baldwin, a senior legal adviser for Human Rights Watch (HRW), told BBC News: \"What it looks like is execution of detainees and if that is the case, that would be a war crime.\"
The development comes as fierce fighting rages for control of Syria\'s largest city, with rebel fighters putting up determined resistance to an army counter-offensive launched on Saturday.

A Syrian combat helicopter crashed in Damascus on Monday, the incident was captured on video and confirmed by state television. Fierce fighting reportedly gripped the east of the capital a day after the regime was accused of a new massacre.
A series of explosions rocked the city from about dawn and a watchdog reported heavy shelling and fighting between government troops and rebels in several eastern and northeastern districts and nearby towns.
State television said the helicopter came down near a mosque in Qaboon, but gave no further information, while the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said it believed it \"was hit while it was being used in fighting nearby.\"
Helicopter gunships were shelling the neighbouring district of Jubar, where anti-regime sentiment is strong, the Observatory said, and reported heavy fighting between the rebel Free Syrian Army and government troops.
A rebel Free Syrian Army group claimed responsibility for the attack, with a spokesman saying that the pilot had been killed.
\"It was in revenge for the Daraya massacre,\" Omar al-Qabooni, a spokesman for the Badr Batallion in Damascus told AFP via Skype. He said the rebels had found the body of the pilot after the burning aircraft crashed to the ground. His claims could not be independently verified.
The assault on the northeast of the capital was unleashed a day after opposition activists accused President Bashar al-Assad\'s regime of gruesome new massacre in the southwestern town of Daraya.
The Observatory said hundreds of bodies had been found in the small Sunni Muslim town after what activists described as brutal five-day onslaught of shelling, summary executions and house-to-house raids by government troops.
It said Sunday that 320 people had been killed and on Monday reported the discovery of another 14 bodies in Daraya after the offensive by troops battling to crush insurgents who have regrouped in the southwestern outskirts of Damascus.
Assad vowed Sunday that he would not change course in the face of what he charged was a \"conspiracy\" by Western and regional powers against Syria.
\"The Syrian people will not allow this conspiracy to achieve its objectives\" and will defeat it \"at any price,\" Assad said at a meeting with a top official from Iran, Syria\'s chief regional ally.
Assad has since March last year been trying through force to smother a popular uprising that has turned into a brutal civil war which has left thousands dead, seen more than 200,000 refugees fleeing to neighbouring countries and 2.5 million in need inside Syria.
But despite their far superior fire power, the government forces are struggling to defeat rebels who have built strongholds in many parts of the country, particularly the northern city of Aleppo.
Human rights groups have accused the regime of committing many atrocities in its attempts to crush the uprising, and a UN panel said earlier this month it was guilty of crimes against humanity.
Grisly videos issued by opposition activists showed dozens of charred and bloodied bodies lined up in broad daylight in a graveyard in Daraya, and others lying wall-to-wall in rooms in a mosque.
The Local Coordination Committees, a network of activists on the ground, said many victims had been summarily executed and their bodies burnt by pro-regime shabiha militias that have been transformed into a \"killing machine\".
\"Bodies were found in fields, basements and shelters and in the streets,\" Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP, adding that many of the victims had died in shelling or were summarily executed.
Britain said that if confirmed, the Daraya massacre \"would be an atrocity on a new scale.\"
State media said blamed the rebels for the killings and said Daraya, a conservative Sunni Muslim town of some 200,000 people, had been \"purified of terrorist remnants.\"
Pro-government television Al-Dunia said \"terrorists\" carried out the attacks, as it interviewed residents including traumatised children and showed a number of bloodied bodies lying in the streets.
\"Our valiant armed forces cleared Daraya of the remnants of armed terrorist groups which committed crimes that traumatised the citizens of the town and destroyed public and private property,\" government newspaper Ath-Thawra said.
Meanwhile, the head of the Iranian parliament\'s foreign policy committee, Aladin Borujerdi, vowed that Tehran will \"stick by our Syrian brothers\" at a meeting with Assad and Vice President Faruq al-Shara in Damascus.
It was the first public appearance in over a month by Shara -- the regime\'s top Sunni Muslim official -- following opposition claims he had tried to defect and was under house arrest.
Iran is a staunch ally of Assad\'s regime but is being excluded from most international efforts aimed at ending the conflict which has divided world powers with the West supporting the rebels and Moscow and Beijing backing Damascus.
The Britain-based Observatory, which has a network of sources on the ground, reported a total of at least 149 people killed nationwide on Sunday.
August is already the deadliest single month of the conflict with at least 4,000 people killed, according to the Observatory, while around 25,000 have died since March 2011. The United Nations puts the death toll at more than 17,000.
The Local Co-ordination Committees (LCC) activist network in Syria said 77 people were killed in two separate mass killings in the Damascus suburbs of Jdeidet Artouz and Yalda on Thursday.
Nationwide, at least 135 people were killed in violence on Wednesday - 74 civilians, 43 soldiers and 18 rebels, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
On Tuesday, 124 people were killed nationwide, around half of them in Aleppo, it said.
A raid by Syrian security forces near the capital Damascus killed 43 people, some of whom were tortured and executed, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Thursday.
“Regime forces entered the Jdaidet Artuz district (southwest of Damascus) on Wednesday and arrested around 100 young people who were taken to a school and tortured,” the watchdog said in a statement.
“On Thursday morning after the operation the bodies of 43 people were recovered. Some of them had been summarily executed,” the watchdog added.
US experts Wednesday urged Washington to drop its cautious stance and boost backing for Syrian rebels, including possible arms and air support, to avoid further bloodshed and atrocities.
They also told US lawmakers that as the Syrian regime begins to move its stockpiles of chemical weapons, the US administration must spell out red lines to President Bashar al-Assad on what would spark military intervention.
\"It would be comforting to think that Assad knows that using such weapons of mass destruction would be crossing a red line - but unfortunately that would be too optimistic,\" Andrew Tabler, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told the Senate Foreign Relations committee.
So far, Washington has refused any talk of US military engagement in Syria and limited its backing for the Syrian opposition to non-lethal support such as communications equipment, with some $25 million set aside for such aid.
It has also provided a further $64 million for humanitarian assistance, such as helping set up camps for the tens of thousands of refugees streaming across the borders of Syria into neighboring Jordan and Turkey.
Just three months before US presidential elections and as the nation withdraws troops in Afghanistan, there is little appetite for any US military action in Syria.
Instead, the administration of President Barack Obama has focused on working to bring together the fractured Syrian opposition in a bid to tip the scales in the 17-month conflict that has claimed an estimated 20,000 lives.
Committee chairman, Democratic Senator John Kerry, said it was \"imperative to work to expedite President Assad\'s exit,\" adding it was perhaps time to shift emphasis and work more closely with organizations such as NATO.
\"What is clear is that we cannot appear to be feckless, or impotent, or ineffective, in the face of this kind of use of force by anybody against their own people with the implications that it has for the region itself,\" Kerry said.
But he cautioned that the United States needed to remain \"clear-eyed,\" saying the United States could not just \"willy-nilly commit some forces to a conflict without... a clear objective, and certainly without sober evaluation of the implications.\"
\"With respect to a red line, I can\'t go into the details here, but I tell you there\'s a red line, and people know what it is. The people who need to know, know what it is,\" Kerry said.
But US senators were warned that the longer the conflict in Syria drags on, the greater the danger of mass atrocities and that the lack of stronger US action could also pave the way for a drawn-out sectarian conflict.
\"The consequences are very bad, and they are coming down the road... that\'s why I think it\'s important for us to step up active engagement, but to do it in a wise way,\" Martin Indyk, ex-US ambassador to Israel, said.
Director for international security at the RAND Corporation James Dobbins said one further step could be imposing a \"no-fly\" zone over some or all of Syria, which would require some kind of US participation.
\"Doing so would present a tougher challenge than faced during the air campaigns over Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan or Iraq, in none of which the United States lost a single pilot, but the task is hardly beyond the capacity of the United States,\" he told senators.
He also argued that if Syrian forces began systematically using fixed-wing aircraft against the opposition, that could be designated as another \"red line\" for greater US engagement.
But Dobbins, a former US ambassador to the European Union, cautioned there should be pre-conditions including that the Syrian opposition asked for help, and that the Arab League endorsed any such call.
Most NATO allies should also support the plan, but while a UN Security Council mandate would be \"highly desirable, as demonstrated in Kosovo, (it is) not absolutely necessary,\" he said.