About 20 people were killed when Syria’s security forces launched a series of raids against suspected anti-government protesters in and around the capital, Damascus.
The renewed clampdown this week came just days before the start of Ramadan on August 1 when protests are expected to intensify.
Activists said local people tried to stop the troops advancing into Kanaker, a southern suburb of Damascus, by throwing stones and closing roads with burning tyres. Electricity and telephone lines to the area were cut off and several people were wounded. Two 10-year-old children were among those killed.
Ten of the victims have been identified by members of local co-ordination committees helping to monitor pro-democracy protests.
“Military security fired and went house to house arresting about 300 men between 15 and 40 years of age,” said Ammar Quarabi, head of the National Organisation for Human Rights in Syria.
Arrests were also reported in other parts of the capital and in surrounding areas such as Zabadani, Barzeh, Midan, Harasta and Barzeh, suggesting that the regime is trying to prevent an escalation of protests during the Muslim holy month.
The government continued with a flurry of reforms this week. Among others, Syria’s Cabinet gave its backing to a draft law on general elections that “completes the package of laws translating the announced political reform programme”, state media agency Sana reported.
But reform pledges have failed to satisfy protesters. Government critics said security forces were selectively killing protest leaders and activists, who have become more adept at organising protests and relaying information to the rest to the world.
The local co-ordination committees named Hady al-Jundi, Khalid al-Afnan and Diyaa al-Najjar, who were shot dead in the central city of Homs last month, as cases of targeted assassinations on the eve of a meeting of Syrian activists in Istanbul.
Late on July 26 Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, became the first prominent figure from his country to call on President Bashar al-Assad to resign. In his first news conference for Arab media Peres, whose country remains officially at war with Syria, paid tribute to demonstrators, who he said were “fighting for peace and who want to live like human beings”.
His comments are an important indicator of a mood change among Syria’s neighbours, who have long disliked Assad but have seen him as key to stability in the region. Despite Damascus’s backing of Hezbollah and Hamas, both Islamist groups with militant wings, Israel has feared that without a strongman Syria would fall into civil strife, unleashing chaos on its border as well as those of Lebanon and Iraq. Although Turkey continues to encourage reform, diplomats say Arab neighbours, who have remained silent, believe Assad will have to go.
Syrians have criticised the silence of the international community in the face of more than 1 500 people killed and thousands detained — the highest death toll in the Arab spring after Libya. But diplomats say they are keen not to be seen as interfering, playing into regime narratives of foreign conspiracy. —