The Syrian regime launched a wave of mass arrests at other protests Friday
The army withdrew from Deraa after 11 days of the assault on the epicenter of the revolt
Despite the brutal repression of yesterday, when hundreds of people were arrested at dawn in Damascus, are now planned further protests against the regime of Bashar Assad.
Syrian Humanitarian organizations estimate the death toll at least 600. In protests no longer ask political and social reforms, but the fall of the Assad. And the unrest spreads to major cities, including Damascus, where there is relatively quiet until last week.
climate of repression does not subside even though the Syrian army announced yesterday that it began to withdraw from Deraa because he had done with the "terrorists" in the area. The city, however, remained incommunicado and under strict curfew, with tanks and snipers on several streets. The port of Banias seemed to be the next target of the military, with columns of armored vehicles patrolling the outskirts and a large troop presence in some neighborhoods.
Deraa The assault lasted 11 days and caused At least fifty deaths, according to local activists, and an unknown number of arrests. The Fourth Armored Division, under the leadership of Maher al-Assad, brother of the president, used tanks, artillery and helicopters to quell what the government described as "armed insurgency of Islamist gangs." A neighbor of Deraa equipped with a satellite phone (the army crippled conventional telephone networks) told Reuters that it had imposed a curfew, banned from the streets after two o'clock in the afternoon and had not completed the house by house arrest. He said that the bands of civilians with weapons that accompanied the military had placed everywhere portraits of Bashar Assad and signs with the praises of the regime.
No doubt that the president, who inherited the post from his father in 2000, he felt threatened. The regime fully controlled the army and the powerful domestic spy service and could still count as fingerprints taken diplomats and business media (the press is prohibited from entering the country), with the support of religious minorities, especially The Alawite, which belongs to the presidential family. But unrest in rural areas by drought and economic crisis and the old frustration of the majority Sunni that drove the first demonstrations in mid-March, had become the rage in the security forces started firing on the crowd. Fear
Asad
The Fear of the president and his family, who, like other Arab dictatorships dominated the main engines of the economy and had amassed a fortune hard to calculate because of endemic corruption, it was evident from the deployment of troops on the eve of today's manifestations. Banias was critical, for the numerical strength of the Sunnis and because they housed one of the two refineries. As in Deraa, the Army made all phones and established entry and exit controls. According to the Associated Press, quoting local sources, many residents began to leave Banias on Wednesday for fear that the event of an assault similar to Deraa.
in two suburbs of Damascus, Saqba and Erbin, police and soldiers made hundreds of arrests yesterday morning. Something similar happened in Tel, a town farther north, according to the network of activists who, equipped with satellite phones that someone (we do not know who) had been provided from Lebanon, disseminated information to the outside. The same sources said that police had broken up with batons and tear gas a student demonstration at the University of Aleppo, Syria's second city and so far almost unrelated to the protests. In another town, Rastan, activists denounced the entry of armored cars and numerous troops.
United States decided a few days ago to impose personal sanctions such as freezing of bank accounts abroad, on various figures of the regime and the European Union approved an arms embargo. These measures did not seem to impress Bashar Assad, who held the blood and fire suppression. International pressure was very smooth and showed little interest in provoking a change of regime, the absence of visible leaders among the Syrian opposition and fear that without the iron fist El Assad began a bloody conflict between religious groups. Source
newspaper "El Pais"
0 comments:
Post a Comment