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Tanks shell Syrian town as West increases pressure
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By Khaled Yacoub Oweis
AMMAN (Reuters) - Tanks shelled a Syrian border town for the fourth day on Wednesday in a military campaign to crush demonstrations against President Bashar al-Assad, under mounting Western pressure to stop repression of...
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Syria under protest
Mon, May 16 2011
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Rehab, who lives in the Lebanese border village of Debbabiyeh and whose brother died in Tel Kelakh early on Monday, reacts in her home in northern Lebanon near the Lebanese-Syrian border, May 17, 2011.
Credit: Reuters/ Mohamed Azakir
By Khaled Yacoub Oweis
AMMAN |
Wed May 18, 2011 11:02am EDT
AMMAN (Reuters) - Tanks shelled a Syrian border town for the fourth day on Wednesday in a military campaign to crush demonstrations against President Bashar al-Assad, under mounting Western pressure to stop repression of protest.
Troops went into Tel Kelakh on Saturday, a day after a demonstration there demanded "the overthrow of the regime," the slogan of revolutions that toppled Arab leaders in Egypt and Tunisia and challenged others across the Middle East.
Assad had been partly rehabilitated in the West over the last three years but the United States and European Union condemned his use of force to quell unrest and warned they plan further steps after imposing sanctions on top Syrian officials.
The Syrian leader told a delegation from the Damascus district of Midan that security forces had made mistakes handling the protests, Wednesday's al Watan newspaper said.
One delegate said Assad told them 4,000 police would receive training "to prevent these excesses" being repeated, it said.
Human rights groups say Assad's crackdown has killed at least 700 civilians. Authorities blame most of the violence on armed groups backed by Islamists and outside powers, saying they have also killed more than 120 soldiers and police.
"We're still without water, electricity or communications," a resident of Tel Kelakh said, speaking by satellite phone.
He said the army was storming houses and making arrests, but withdrawing from neighborhoods after the raids. In a sign that the army was coming under fire in the town, he said some families "are resisting, preferring death to humiliation."
Syria has barred most international media organisations from operating in Syria, making it hard to verify reports from activists and officials.
Prominent human rights lawyer Razan Zaitouna said the army and security forces have killed at least 27 civilians since the army moved into Tel Kelakh.
The state news agency SANA quoted a military source saying eight soldiers had been killed on Tuesday in Tel Kelakh and in the southern rural Deraa province where protests first broke out exactly two months ago.
It said five of the dead were killed when an "armed terrorist group" fired on a security forces patrol near Tel Kelakh, which is close to Lebanon's northern border.
The Tel Kelakh resident said artillery and heavy machinegun fire hit the main road leading to Lebanon overnight, as well as the Abraj neighborhood inhabited by minority Turkmen and Kurds.
"Most residents of Tel Kelakh have fled. Some remaining people tried to escape to Lebanon yesterday but the shelling has been too heavy," the resident said.
"Abraj residents have issued a call to (Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip) Erdogan to help them. But it is like the drowning hanging on to a straw," he said.
Erdogan said last week 1,000 people had been killed in Syria's unrest, and has become increasingly critical of Assad.
TANKS MOVE INTO SOUTHERN CITY
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Washington would respond to Syria's crackdown with additional steps in coming days if the government did not change course.
Switzerland said on Wednesday it would impose travel bans on 13 top Syrian officials -- not including Assad himself -- and freeze any of their assets held in Swiss banks, matching a decision by the European Union last week.
Syrian tanks also moved into a southern city on the Hauran Plain on Tuesday after encircling it for three weeks. Soldiers fired machineguns as tanks and armored personnel carriers entered Nawa, a city of 80,000 people 60 km (40 miles) north of the city of Deraa, according to activists from the region.
"The governor (of the province) had announced that the troops have the names of 180 wanted men in Nawa, but the arrests are arbitrary," one rights campaigner said.
In a possible indication of the ferocity of the crackdown, villagers near Deraa have found two separate graves containing up to 26 bodies, residents said on Tuesday. Syrian authorities dismissed such reports as part of "campaign of incitement."
Deraa residents said tanks were still on the streets of their city and rights campaigners said the southern towns of Inkhil and Jassem also remained besieged. Mass arrests continued in the Hauran Plain and other regions of Syria, they added.
Protests erupted in the Damascus suburb of Douma, Syria's second city Aleppo, the town of Zabadani in the foothills of mountains separating Syria and Lebanon, the central town of Rastan, Hama and the Deir al-Zor region near Iraq's border.
Most were not large but rights campaigners said they were significant given the severe security clampdown.
(Editing by Ralph Boulton)
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Comments (3)
amos033 wrote:
Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria which Muslim Country will be next? And nothing is settled yet in any of those countries. Will Turkey send that Mavi Marbara to try and provoke Israel again? I hope the State Deptartment warns Turkey in no uncetain terms not to allow that to happen again. God bless President Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu.
May 18, 2011 6:56am EDT -- Report as abuse
daddyr wrote:
amos033 wrote:
God bless President Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu.
The statement about Obama I agree with but Netanyahu is the biggest crook in the region. His country and it’s various leaders have been inciting violence there for years, stealing lands from innocent Arabs. Yes I said innocent, you would turn to violence too if someone literally stole your lands from under you and don’t tell me the Israelites had a claim there because the majority of Jews have been in Eastern Europe for almost 1000 years until that madman Hitler came along !!!
May 18, 2011 9:17am EDT -- Report as abuse
daddyr wrote:
I wonder if the west realizes that all the “assistance” they are giving the people of these mid eastern countries will only back fire in their faces. These countries have been kept “in check” by the insane lunatics ruling these countries but now that they are gone or being pushed out by the west, even more insane lunatics and their extremist ideas will fill the vaccuum of power. People such as extremist islamic clerics will assume power and make it worse on the people than they have it now.
Look at Afghanistan and Iran as examples, every time “the West” (and when I say the West I mean the USA) meddles in foreign affairs it backfires in our faces and creates a whole new monster to deal with!
Lets try this for a few hundred years… Lets mind our own business and concentrate on the internal affairs of our own nation and let the other nations of the world fix their own problems, for it should not be our young men and women who are dying on foreign soil protecting the people there from the boogey man, they don’t appreciate it anyhow !!!
After all when we wanted freedom from an insane tyrant (King George III), we fought for it ourselves and that’s why our nation has been successful, because “we the people” wanted it bad enough! until “they the people” want it bad enough, nothing will change in the middle east… NOTHING !!!
May 18, 2011 9:29am EDT -- Report as abuse
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