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ASSAD’S FORCES OPEN FIRE ON UNARMED PROTESTERS AFTER PRAYERS.

Al Arabiya

ASSAD’S FORCES OPEN FIRE ON UNARMED PROTESTERS AFTER PRAYERS

Friday, 17 June 2011

Syrian forces opened fire on protesters in the western city of Banias Friday, causing casualties, a rights activist said, adding that demonstrations were being staged in several places across the country after the weekly Muslim main prayers.

Elsewhere in Syria, thousands of people took to the streets again after the opposition called for a day of massive demonstrations, pressing on with their three-month-old campaign to topple authoritarian President Bashar Al Assad.

Troops in large numbers poured into Maaret al-Numan, 45 kilometers (28 miles) from the Turkish border, said Syria-based rights activist Mustafa Osso. He said other forces were now massing around Khan Sheikhon, to the south, where gunmen attacked army forces earlier this month.

Omar Idilbi of the Local Coordination Committees, which is documenting the protests, said government forces had taken full control of Maaret al-Numan, a town of 100,000 on the highway linking Damascus with Syria’s second-largest city, Aleppo. Many of its residents had fled as troops swept through Idlib province in recent days.

Meanwhile, France wants the European Union to impose tougher sanctions on President Assad’s regime in response to his harsh crackdown protesters, the French foreign ministry said on Friday.

France was reacting after EU officials confirmed they are planning to add more firms and a dozen people to a list of targeted asset freezes and travel bans that already includes Assad and key allies.

“France supports an expansion of the European sanctions against Syria to economic entities,” spokesman Bernard Valero told reporters in Paris, adding that Syrian banks and private firms linked to regime figures could be hit.

He said discussions were under way with fellow EU states ahead of a meeting on Monday of the bloc’s foreign affairs committee.

Since the protests erupted in mid-March, Mr. Assad has unleashed the military in region after region to crush street demonstrations. Human rights activists say more than 1,400 Syrians have been killed and 10,000 detained. Some 9,600 others from the northwest have sought refuge in camps in neighboring Turkey.

One of those refugees, asking to be identified only as Mohamed, said he fled with his family as the military besieged Jisr al-Shughour, a rebellious town it recaptured last Sunday.

“I saw people who were beheaded with machine-gun fire from helicopters,” and man tortured to death when security forces “poured acid on to his body,” he told The Associated Press.

He said a sugar factory in the city was turned into a jail where they “hold quick trials and execute anyone who they believe participated in protests.”

It’s impossible to independently confirm many accounts coming out of Syria. Foreign journalists have been expelled from the country and local reporters face tight controls.

In the northeast, meanwhile, about 2,000 protesters marched in the towns of Amouda and Qamishli shortly after Friday prayers ended, chanting for the regime’s downfall, the Local Coordination Committees said.

Friday has become the main day for protests in the Arab world, and Syrians have turned out every week in large numbers nationwide, inspired by democratic revolutions in autocrat-ruled Tunisia and Egypt.

The opposition has attached a name to each Friday’s campaign, naming this one “The Day of Saleh al-Ali,” an Alawite leader who led an uprising against French colonial rule in the 20th century.

Using an Alawite figure’s name was meant to show that President Assad’s opponents were not rising up over secular concerns. The Assad regime is dominated by the Alawite minority, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, but the country is overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim.

Alawite dominance has bred resentment, which Assad has worked to tamp down by pushing a strictly secular identity in Syria. But the president now appears to be relying heavily on his Alawite power base, beginning with highly placed Assad relatives, to crush the resistance.

The government blames a foreign conspiracy for the unrest, saying religious extremists are behind it – not true reformers. Military chiefs said the northwestern sweep was needed to rid the area of “armed terrorists.”

But refugees like Mohamed said they only want freedom. “What is our guilt? We just demanded freedom and democracy nothing else.”

(Mustapha Ajbaili, a senior editor at Al Arabiya English, can be reached at Mustapha.ajbaili@mbc.net)

 

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