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DEBKAfile Special Report April 24, 2011, 7:46 PM (GMT+02:00)

Syria plunged in bloodbath

Bashar Assad’s tanks and infantry made their first assaults Sunday, April 24 on Jableh on the Mediterranean and Daraa in the south, after a 48-hour bloodbath by his security forces claiming up to 350 lives failed break the five-week countrywide uprising against his rule. Video-clips show tanks converging on the two towns with soldiers running in their wake while heavy gunfire continued to resound in Hama, al-Nuaimeh near Daraa and Saraqeb, southwest of Aleppo.

The Syrian ruler continues to ignore all the evidence that by massacring civilian protesters he has only magnified their numbers and Sunday decided to press ahead with his last resort for piling on the violence by deploying trained infantry men and tanks in a final attempt to smash the five-week uprising, debkafile‘s military sources report.

The southern epicenter of the uprising Daraa has resisted the most ruthless attempts to suppress its protest rallies. Less has been heard about Jabal, a town of 80,000 situated between Banias and Latakia. Anti-Assad demonstrators have barricaded themselves inside the Abu Bakr Siddiq Mosque, one of Syria’s main Sufi centers.
debkafile reported earlier Sunday:

Saturday, April 23 saw the constantly mounting uprising against the Assad regime finally reaching the Syrian capital Damascus where debkafile reports 300,000 – 15 percent of the city’s dwellers – took the streets shouting: “Bashar Assad you are a traitor!” That day too the Syrian ruler unleashed his security forces for the harshest crackdown yet in order to break the back of the five-week civil uprising. The result: 350 dead, tripling the number of Friday’s bloodbath and thousands of injured.

Early Sunday, secret service thugs hauled thousands of protesters out of their homes. They broke down doors in the Harasta and Ghouta districts of Damascus, dragged their victims out and dumped them on covered trucks which drove off to unknown destinations. Ghouta is the ancient garden quarter of Damascus.
The growing number of injured are condemned to being treated privately or not at all. The authorities have commandeered ambulances to prevent them reaching hospital and hospital wards are raided by security agents who eitheir kill the wounded or arrest them.
debkafile‘s military and intelligence sources reported that Assad will decide finally at noon Sunday, April 24, whether to muster all 11 divisions of his army and let them loose on the uprising. We reported Friday that the embattled Syrian president had ordered the troops to start moving into the cities the next day. Our sources later reported that he reversed his order at the last minute, reluctant to throw his last card into his desperate bid for survival for fear of a fatal backlash. Some units had already left their bases and remain parked outside the targeted cities awaiting orders to go in.
As the unrest against his rule gains ground, the Syrian president’s options are shrinking. Small numbers of security forces can no longer venture into some of the more troubled areas of the country where armed protesters reign unless accompanied by large-scale strength with massive fire power.

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