CAIRO — The Syrian government said “armed gangs” had slaughtered at least 120 police officers, security personnel and civilians in a town near its border with Turkey on Monday, an account that, if true, suggests a violent shift in the uprising against Syria’s hard-line leadership.  Many opposition figures and local residents disputed official Syrian news media reports of what was happening in the town, Jisr al-Shoughour. Some said the violence was set off by the defection of soldiers sent to besiege the town on Saturday, a number of them seeking “refuge with the citizens” of the town, according to a statement released by an opposition group, Local Coordinating Committees in Syria.  The number of dead ballooned throughout the day as state media described a “massacre” by unidentified gunmen, and said residents were “pleading” for the army to intervene. But state television provided few details of the dead and no images of the town. Instead, throughout the day an ever-higher estimate of fatalities scrolled across the bottom of Syrian television screens.  Neither the government’s nor the opposition’s version of events could be independently verified, but both would represent a troubling escalation in the popular uprising — and the bloody government crackdown — that has gripped Syria since mid-March. Although the protests in many Syrian cities have been peaceful, the government of President Bashar al-Assad has claimed that it faces an armed insurrection by extremists and terrorists, possibly to justify the widespread deployment of troops and tanks to crush dissent.  There have been sporadic armed clashes with opponents of the government during the revolt, and human rights groups did not rule out the possibility of violent reprisals against troops by people who lived in Jisr al-Shoughour, a Sunni Muslim area with a history of support for the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood.  Telephone and Internet service to the town was heavily disrupted on Monday night. But residents reached by phone described scenes of mass flight and street barricades hastily built by the people to defend against the return of security forces.  “The army split; the confrontation is between them,” said Saeb Jamil, a local activist who said he was helping people flee to the nearby Turkish border. “The army is confronting the army.”  It was unclear from residents’ accounts if local people took part in the conflict between defectors and elements of the security forces that remained loyal. Camille Otrakji, a Damascus-born political blogger living in Montreal, said the country was tinderbox waiting for a spark, especially as the unrest dragged on and tensions mounted.  “It doesn’t take much to get people there to use arms,” Mr. Otrakji said. “You can never control everybody on the streets. If you get people angry enough, the arms are there, and they’re going to go for it.”  The town was the target of a military operation that began on Saturday night. Attacks using helicopter gunships and armored cars mounted with machine guns killed more than two dozen people and drew forces from other cities like Latakia and Homs, said activists in those towns.  Elements of the security forces began fighting each other around dusk on Sunday in the town’s Friki District and soon withdrew to an area about 12 miles east, Mr. Jamil said. He described the town on Monday night as “a city of ghosts.” Most of its population had fled, he said, save a few who remained behind to defend against looters and prepare for a renewed military assault.  But another resident, a 28-year-old who gave his name only as Omar, said clashes continued on Monday between “tens of soldiers” who had defected to defend the town, on one side, and members of military intelligence and plainclothes security agents on the other.  For weeks, opposition figures and rights activists have claimed to receive reports of defecting soldiers killed by others in their unit as the crackdown against a string of restive towns has ground across the country. If the residents’ accounts of events in Jisr al-Shoughour are confirmed, the clashes would represent the largest known episode of infighting within the Syrian security forces since the start of the uprising, which the government has described as a Sunni sectarian attack on the country’s fragile balance of ethnic groups and religious denominations.  Jisr al-Shoughour is at the edge of the remote and neglected agricultural province of Idlib, an impoverished hub of Sunni conservatism and well-armed smuggling activity that is centered on tribal networks spanning the nearby Turkish border. Antigovernment sentiment has swelled there , said a rights activist, Wissam Tarif. Record numbers filled the streets for antigovernment protests on Friday. “The whole area is rising up,” Mr. Tarif said.  The town’s location on the Turkish border, and its history of ties to areas beyond it, may have sounded an alarm for Damascus, analysts said. Some of the uprising’s harshest crackdowns have occurred in other border regions, like the town of Dara’a on the Jordanian border, and Baniyas, a coastal town close to Lebanon.  “One thing I’ve heard is that the regime is being particularly hard on border towns because they are petrified of another Benghazi being carved out,” said Amr al-Azm, a Syrian dissident and historian at Shawnee State University in Ohio, referring to the rebel stronghold in Libya. “It’s bandit country, right on the border with Turkey.”  Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon; Katherine Zoepf from New York; and an employee of The New York Times from Damascus, Syria.
Syriaâs state news agency said that residents were âpleadingâ for the army to intervene after the attacks, which could not be verified.