Over 40 people, including women and children, have been killed over the past 24 hours by armed groups in Syria's central Homs province, private al-Watan daily reported Tuesday.

"Those armed groups have taped the massacres and sent them to news TVs to portray them as victims of a government forces assault, " the daily said.

Quoting an official source in Homs, the paper said the armed groups committed three "massacres" in Karm al-Zaitoun neighborhood, in which they kidnapped and killed 25 people.

It quoted other sources in the unrest-torn province as saying that another 18 people were killed in al-Qarabis neighborhood for refusing to host the armed group members.

After the killing in Homs, Syrian Information Minister Adnan Mahmoud accused Qatar and Saudi Arabia in a press release of supporting the attacks. He also criticized TV channels of al- Jazeera and al-Arabiya for untruthful reports.

The Syrian government has accused some Arab and Western countries of providing weapons and financial support to the armed groups in Syria. It said in December 2011 that "armed terrorist groups" had killed more than 2,000 army and security personnel during the unrest.

Earlier in February, the Syrian army carried a three-week crackdown on rebel fighters in the Baba Amr neighborhood in Homs and cleansed this area. But the rebels moved to another front in the northern Idlib province, which also witnessed tough clashes between the rebels and army troops over the past couple of days.

Al-Watan said Tuesday that the army managed to retake control of Idlib in a swift operation.

The Syrian government accused the armed groups of ramping up assaults and crimes before a United Nations Security Council meeting to pressure the 15 member states to bring international condemnation onto the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

However, the opposition at home rejected the government's account of the atrocities in Homs and placed the blame on the government. Abdul-Aziz Khair, a member of the National Coordination Body, told Xinhua that the government was responsible for the bloodshed, calling for protection for civilians in the restive areas.

Another opponent Taib Tayzinin, a university professor, said that "I don't see any truth in the regime's account, and those armed men belong to the regime... It's a very dangerous matter and the regime must not be allowed to the do that."

The United States and Russia debated Monday at the UN Security Council over the Syrian crisis. Both the countries called for an end to the one-year-old domestic conflict, but with different approaches.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the Security Council should not "stand silent when governments massacre their own people, threatening regional peace and security in the process. "

However, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that " Hasty demands for regime change (are) risky recipes of geopolitical engineering which can only result in further conflict. "

"At this stage we should not talk about who was the first to start, but rather discuss realistic and feasible approaches which would allow (us) to achieve the ceasefire as a priority," he added.

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