AMMAN (Reuters) – Syrian troops and gunmen loyal to President Bashar al-Assad stormed a town near the Turkish border yesterday, burning houses and arresting dozens, witnesses said, in a persistent military campaign to crush popular revolt.
The latest assault followed another Friday of protests, which have grown in size and scope over the last three months, despite Assad’s violent clampdown on public dissent. Activists said security forces shot dead 19 protesters on Friday.
“They came at 7 am. to Bdama. I counted nine tanks, 10 armoured carriers, 20 jeeps and 10 buses. I saw shabbiha (pro-Assad gunmen) setting fire to two houses,” said Saria Hammouda, a lawyer living in the border town in the Jisr al-Shughour region, where thousands of Syrians had fled to Turkey after the army clamped down on the area this month.
Bdama is one of the nerve centres providing food and supplies to several thousand other Syrians who have escaped the violence from frontier villages but chose to take shelter temporarily in fields on the Syrian side of the boundary.
“Bdama’s residents don’t dare take bread to the refugees and the refugees are fearful of arrests if they go into Bdama for food,” Rami Abdulrahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told Reuters.
Another witness said government troops were also burning crops on nearby hillsides in an apparent scorched earth policy.
European powers initiated a detente with Assad before the unrest to try to draw the Syrian leader away from Iran and also stabilise Lebanon.
But they now say Damascus should face tougher sanctions over the violence against demonstrators seeking more political freedoms and an end to corruption and poverty.
Syrian rights groups say at least 1,300 civilians have been killed and 10,000 people detained since March. One group has said more than 300 soldiers and police have also been killed.
Tens of thousands rallied across Syria on Friday, defying Assad’s repression and ignoring a pledge that his tycoon cousin Rami Makhlouf, a symbol of corruption among the elite, would renounce his business empire and channel his wealth to charity.
People rallied in the southern province of Deraa where the revolt began, in the Kurdish northeast, the province of Deir al-Zor near Iraq’s Sunni heartland, the city of Hama north of Damascus, on the coast and in suburbs of the capital itself.
“The security grip is weakening because the protests are growing in numbers and spreading. More people are risking their lives to demonstrate. The Syrian people realise that this is an opportunity for liberty that comes once in hundreds of years,” opposition figure Walid al-Bunni told Reuters from Damascus.
The Local Coordination Committees, a main activist group linked to protesters, said 10 demonstrators were killed on Friday in Homs, a merchant city of 1 million people in central Syria.
State television said a policeman was killed by gunmen.
One protester was also reported killed in the northern commercial hub of Aleppo, the first to die there in the unrest.
Thousands of people turned up to a funeral of a dead protester in Deir al-Zor, chanting anti-government slogans, Abdulrahman said.
