DEMONSTRATIONS REPORTEDLY erupted overnight in the Syrian cities of Homs and Hama and a Damascus suburb. On the campus of Aleppo University, security agents wielding batons were said to have broken up a gathering yesterday of 2,000 students.
Residents fleeing across the border into Lebanon from Tal Kalakh just inside Syria reported shelling of the town, executions, and decomposing bodies in the streets.
Activists have said at least 16 people, eight members of the same family, have been killed recently in Tal Kalakh, a town of 70,000, while the army announced it had captured or killed “armed criminals” at Tal Kalakh and three soldiers had died in action.
Anti-regime Facebook administrators called for a general strike today in Syria. The Sweden-based Syrian Revolution 2011 Facebook page displayed an image of a child saying, “Father, your participation in the strike is a guarantee of my future.” Although the government has announced the beginning of a “national dialogue”, demonstrators have adopted the slogan, “No dialogue until [President] Bashar al-Assad goes.”
Mustafa Osso – head of the Kurdish Organisation for the Defence of Human Rights and Public Freedoms in Syria – said on Monday about 3,000 rallied in the industrial city of Homs, a hub of unrest. “There were no reports of shooting or tear gas being used,” he stated, indicating that troops had obeyed an order not to shoot issued last week by Dr Assad.
The National Organisation for Human Rights reported that 34 people were killed over five days in villages near Deraa, the southern town where protests began in mid- March. Ammar Qurabi, the organisation’s chairman, said five bodies had been found in the centre of Deraa, boosting the overall death toll to 850.
Residents of Deraa reported a mass grave holding 13 corpses discovered in farmland near the town. The grave was said to include the bodies of a 62-year-old man, Abdel Razaq Abdel Aziz Abazied, four of his sons, a woman and child. But an unidentified official at the interior ministry replied that such reports were “completely baseless” and argued these charges “came in the context of the campaign of provocation, slander and fabrication against Syria”. He said “an armed terrorist group” had fired on a police vehicle near Homs, killing two policemen and wounding an army officer and three others.
The Syrian news agency, Sana, reported Dr Assad held a meeting with a Deraa delegation and discussed the “positive atmosphere” created by “co-operation between the residents and the army”.
Although the town remains under firm control, tanks have been withdrawn to the outskirts, landline telephone connections restored and the curfew reduced.
Meanwhile, Washington condemned Damascus for permitting hundreds of Palestinians living in Syria to cross into the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights during Naqba Day on Sunday, the anniversary of Israel’s establishment.
White House press secretary Jay Carney said, “It seems apparent to us [the breaching of the ceasefire line] is an effort to distract attention from the legitimate expression of protest by the Syrian people,” indicating the US regards the Palestinian protests to be illegitimate.
