Reuters/Amman
Security forces shot dead four demonstrators yesterday as people streamed out of mosques after prayers to mark the end of Ramadan and renewed protests against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, activists and residents said.
The victims, who included a 13-year-old boy, were killed in the towns of Al Hara and Inkhil in southern Daraa province.
Demonstrations broke out elsewhere across the country, notably in Damascus suburbs, the city of Homs, 165km to the north, and the northwestern province of Idlib, the sources said.
“The people want the downfall of the president,” protesters shouted in the Damascus suburb of Harasta, where activists said dozens of soldiers defected at the weekend after refusing to shoot at the crowds.
In adjacent Saqba suburb a crowd held their shoes up in the air—an insulting gesture in the Arab world—and chanted anti-Assad slogans.
According to one activist group, troops have killed at least 551 civilians during Ramadan.
Five months into the street uprising against his rule, Assad, from Syria’s minority Alawite sect, is facing more frequent demonstrations. Protesters have been encouraged by the collapse of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, with whom Assad had close ties, and rising international pressure on the ruling hierarchy.
The Obama administration froze the US assets of Foreign Minister Walid Muallem and two other Syrian officials yesterday in response to Assad’s increasingly bloody crackdown.
The Treasury Department also named Ali Abdul Karim Ali, Syria’s ambassador to Lebanon, where Assad wields influence through the Shia Hezbollah guerrilla group, and his adviser Bouthaina Shaaban.
“We are bringing additional pressure to bear today directly on three senior Assad regime officials who are principle defenders of the regime’s activities,” said David Cohen, Treasury’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, in a statement.
Muallem and Shaaban have appeared in the media defending military assaults on towns and cities, saying Syrian forces were pursuing “terrorists”. They are not part of Assad’s decision-making inner circle, composed of his younger brother Maher, other family members and top security officials already on the US sanctions list.
Opposition figures in Syria see international pressure as crucial in stripping Assad of legitimacy and in helping raise the momentum of peaceful protests, with residents and activists reporting increasing defections among Syrian troops, drawn mostly from the Sunni majority population but dominated by Alawite officers effectively under the command of Maher.
In the capital, YouTube footage showed soldiers from core units roaming the centre in big green public transport buses, their AK-47s hanging out from bus doors, to prevent protests, which broke out nonetheless in Qaboun, Kfar Souseh, Rukn al-Din and Maydan districts, activists said.
In a report published yesterday, the Syrian Revolution Co-ordinating Union grassroots activists’ group said Assad’s forces killed 551 people during Ramadan and that 130 others were killed on July 31, the eve of Ramadan, in a tank assault on the city of Hama, scene of a 1982 massacre by the military.
“The report does not include the number of martyrs who were not identified by name nor... bodies that were abducted (by security forces) and not returned to their families,” it said.
Chibli Mallat, a professor of law at Harvard, and chairman of the Right to Nonviolence international group of public figures, said Syria’s death toll, although high, was still relatively less than Libya, where the revolution turned into armed conflict and needed Nato’s help.
“It may be also the case in Syria today...But is it necessary to reach the point that arms are engaged?” Mallat said in an article published yesterday in Egypt’s Al Ahram online.
“Is it not wiser, albeit perhaps more frustrating, to keep the revolution pure in the tenacity of its non-violence, rather than lose the absolute moral superiority against violent rulers?” said Mallat, who is Lebanese.
The official state news agency said state television had aired an audio recording of two “terrorists” who described themselves as activists.
It said the tape revealed “a full agenda of provocation and targeting police and army camps and terrorising peaceful citizens in the name of freedom and non-violence”.
The Syrian National Human Rights Organisation, headed by exiled dissident Ammar al-Qurabi, said pro-Assad forces, including a loyalist militia known as shabbiha, had killed at least 3,100 civilians since the uprising erupted in March, including 18 people on Monday alone.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay said this month that 2,200 people have been killed, with Assad’s forces continuing “to employ excessive force, including heavy artillery, to quell peaceful demonstrations and regain control over the residents of various cities.”
A military tank takes position in a residential street in the flashpoint city of Homs, 160km northeast of Damascus, yesterday.
