the night sky

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The rockets struck a military research centre in Jamraya on the outskirts of the capital in the early hours of this morning, state TV said. The building was the target of an earlier Israeli strike in January. Video footage uploaded online by activists claims to show a huge ball of fire rising into the night sky Meanwhile, hundreds of families are fleeing a Syrian coastal area where activists say government troops have massacred nearly 200, many of whom were women and children. The opponents of Bashar al Assad's regime say that fighters loyal to the President carried out two massacres last night and on Thursday in a Sunni Muslim area driving by a policy of ethnic cleansing. Activists posted a video online of the bodies of 10 people it said were killed in Ras al Nabaa, in the city of Banias, in an attack overnight. Half of them were children. Activists said that the number of dead could be as high as 60. It comes just two days after pro-Assad militias are alleged to have killed as many as 100 Sunnis in the nearby village of Baida. A baby had burned legs and a body stained with blood. Next to him was a young girl whose face had been deformed after apparently being hit with sharp metal. Other footage from activists showed entire families killed in their beds, a dead mother cradling her child in her arms, two toddlers lying next to them. The videos have not been independently verified. Syria's crisis, that began in March 2011 with pro-democracy protests and later turned into a civil war that has killed an estimated 70,000 people, has largely broken along sectarian lines. The Sunni majority forms the backbone of the rebellion, while Mr Assad's minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam, anchors the regime's security services and the military's officer corps. Other minorities, such as Christians, largely support Mr Assad or stand on the sidelines, worried that the regime's fall would bring about a more Islamist rule.