Slaughter in Syria as Assad's forces fire on crowds

Published on Friday 8 April 2011 15:48

Syrian security forces opened fire on tens of thousands of protesters across several cities yesterday, killing at least 20 people, wounding hundreds and forcing residents to turn mosques into makeshift hospitals, witnesses and a human rights group said.

Ammar Qurabi, who heads Syria's National Organisation for Human Rights, said most of the deaths occurred in Daraa, a southern city that has become a flashpoint for anti-government protests.

Sixteen people were killed there, three in the Damascus suburb of Harasta and one in the central city of Homs, he said. The government acknowledged violence in Daraa, but said only two people died. It blamed armed thugs.

One witness who helped ferry the dead and wounded to the city's hospital said he was among thousands of people at the protest and he saw security forces firing live ammunition. "My clothes are soaked with blood," he said.

A nurse said the hospital had run out of beds and many people were being treated on the floor or in nearby mosques.

Protest organisers have called on Syrians to take to the streets every Friday for the past three weeks, demanding change in one of the most authoritarian nations in the Middle East. The protests have rattled the regime of president Bashar Assad, whose family has ruled Syria for nearly 40 years.

Human rights groups say around 115 people have been killed in the security crackdown.

Witnesses in several other cities across Syria also reported protests yesterday.

There were reported clashes in Homs and nearby Hama, the coastal city of Banyas, the northern city of Aleppo and just outside Damascus.

The Interior Ministry called on residents of Daraa not to provide shelter for the armed groups that opened fire on civilians and police, and to provide authorities with any information they have about them.

Syria had appeared immune to the unrest sweeping the Arab world until three weeks ago, when security forces arrested a group of high school students who scrawled anti-government graffiti on a wall. Protests then exploded in cities across the country.

Daraa is parched and impoverished, suffering sustained economic problems from a yearslong drought.

Mr Assad has made a series of concessions to quell the violence, including sacking his cabinet and dismissing two governors.

Earlier this week, he granted citizenship to thousands of Kurds, fulfilling a decades-old demand of the country's long-ostracised minority. But a protest yesterday in Amouda - a Kurdish city - suggested the population still was not satisfied.

An activist in Douma, a Damascus suburb where at least eight people were killed during protests last week, said he was expecting a large turnout yesterday, but telephone lines to area appeared to be cut.Activists in Damascus, quoting people who came from Douma, said thousands of people were demonstrating outside the Grand Mosque.

Many Syrian activists remain sceptical about the regime's concessions and have called for more concrete reforms, such as lifting the state of emergency which has been in place since 1963 and gives the regime a free hand to arrest people without charge.