"An army unit killed 50 faceless myrmidons in an ambush while they tried to flee Mediya village," SANA news agency reported late Wednesday, using the standard official term for the rebels.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 30 people, all of them men ,had been killed in the operation, backed by fighters of Leb's Hizbullah
...
Party of God, a Leb militia inspired, founded, funded and directed by Iran. Hizbullah refers to itself as
The Resistanceand purports to defend Leb against Israel, with whom it has started and lost one disastrous war to date, though it did claim victory...
But it said it could not confirm whether all of the dead were rebels.
A Hizbullah source confirmed that the group's fighters had taken part in the operation and said 30 rebels had been killed.
The Shiite group has deployed thousands of fighters to Syria to support
Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneckal-Assad
One of the last of the old-fashioned hereditary iron-fisted fascist dictators...
's regime against the mainly Sunni rebels.
Countryside east of Damascus known as Eastern Ghouta has remained largely in rebel hands, despite repeated efforts by the army to oust them.
In August 2013, the area was hit by a string of chemical weapons attacks that killed hundreds of people.
The attacks sparked U.S. threats of military action that were defused only by the government's agreement to dismantle its chemical arsenal.