WarSclerotic

The arrest came one day after Mr. Tayara reported shelling and gunfire had rocked Homs, Syria’s third largest city, which has been the focus of a massive military operation since Monday.

Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Thursday that Washington and its allies were seeking ways to increase pressure on Syria to make reforms.

Secretary Clinton, in Greenland for talks with foreign ministers, said President Assad was increasingly isolated.

“We are going to hold the Syrian government accountable,” she said after meeting the Danish foreign minister. “The United States along with Denmark and other colleagues are going to look for ways to increase the pressure.”

Thousands of students meanwhile defied the crackdown to stage a protest in Syria’s second-largest city Aleppo late Wednesday before being dispersed by baton-wielding loyalists and security force personnel, a rights activist said.

At least 19 civilians were killed on Wednesday as troops and unknown gunmen assaulted protest hubs across the country, shelling and firing on some and encircling others with tanks, according to accounts by human rights activists.

Among the dead was an eight-year-old boy, Ammar Qurabi, the head of the National Organization for Human Rights in Syria, told Agence-France Presse.

Sniper fire killed 13 people, including the youngster, in the village of al-Harra, near the protest center of Deraa, south of Damascus, Mr. Qurabi said.

The deadly confrontations occurred as troops and security forces “arrested dozens of wanted men and seized large quantities of weapons and ammunition in the Bab Amr neighborhood of Homs” and in Deraa.

Another human rights activist said shelling and automatic weapons fire had rocked Homs, Syria’s third largest city.

The army also kept up its sweep of the flashpoint Mediterranean town of Banias, scouting for “protest organizers yet to be arrested,” said Rami Abdul Rahman of the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Between 600 and 700 people have been killed and at least 10,000 arrested since the start of the protest movement in mid-March, human rights groups say.

The Syrian authorities insist they are pursuing “armed terrorist gangs.”

In Washington, the State Department denounced the crackdown as “barbaric,” according to AFP.

Syrian authorities “continue to extend their violent actions against peaceful demonstrators,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner said.

“These repressive measures -namely the ongoing campaign of arbitrary arrests, the denial of medical care to wounded persons, the inhumane conditions of detainees- are barbaric measures that amount to collective punishment of innocent civilians,” he said.

Toner said that “we don’t throw the word ‘barbaric’ around here very often” but that in this case “the window is narrowing for the Syrian government to shift focus from its outright repression towards meeting the legitimate aspirations of its people.”

Analysts said the US administration is still reluctant to call for an end to Mr. Assad’s increasingly violent and repressive regime fearing that a revolution in Syria, a country of 23 million people, could bring chaos to a key part of the Middle East with significant repercussions for Lebanon, Iran and beyond.

Influential senators unveiled a resolution in Congress on Wednesday urging President Obama to declare, as he did of former president Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, that Mr. Assad no longer has the legitimacy to govern and must step down.

The resolution also called on President Obama to expand sanctions against the Syrian government and speak out “directly and personally” on a brutal crackdown that has seen hundreds of protesters killed and thousands arrested.

Russia, a traditional Damascus ally, rejected calls for a special UN Security Council meeting on Syria to condemn the crackdown.

In the face of the persistent violence, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees suspended operations for 50,000 people in central and southern Syria, while Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations called for an end to “excessive force.”

Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashton of the European Union said the bloc has left the door open for extending sanctions against Syria to include President Assad.

The EU put 13 Syrian officials on its sanctions list on Tuesday, including a brother of the 46-yaer-olf president, in a first step aimed at forcing Syria to end violence against anti-government protesters.

“President Assad is not on the list but that does not mean the foreign ministers won’t return to this subject,” Ashton told Austrian radio in an interview broadcast on Thursday, Reuters reported.

The EU’s most recent asset freezes and travel bans were part of a package of sanctions including an arms embargo, but stopped short of French calls to add Mr. Assad to the blacklist.

The government said it formed a commission to draft within two weeks a new law to govern general elections that meets “international criteria,” SANA reported.

“Our goal is to draw up an electoral law that is similar to the best laws across the world,” said Deputy Justice Minister Najm al-Ahmed.

Protesters are demanding free elections, the release of political prisoners, constitutional changes that would strip the ruling Baath party of its hegemony over Syria as well as new media and political parties laws.

Last month, under pressure from the international community, Assad lifted nearly five decades years of emergency rule but the heavy-handed crackdown on pro-reform protesters has continued unabated.

(Mustapha Ajbaili, an editor at Al Arabiya can be reached at: Mustapha.ajbaili@mbc.net. Abeer Tayel, an editor at Al Arabiya English, can be reached at: abeer.tayel@mbc.net)