Syria protest leaders arrested in Banias as Assad sends tanks into major cities

Protest leaders in northwest Syria’s flashpoint port city of Banias were among more than 250 people arrested, including physicians in a hospital under siege, a Syrian human rights group said.

Sheikh Anas al-Ayrout, a Muslim cleric considered the head of the dissent movement in Banias, was among those detained as were dozens of women, the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, according to Agence-France Presse.

Security forces also surrounded al-Jamiyyeh hospital and rounded up several doctors, the group said.

Syrian troops backed by tanks and security forces were hunting down opponents of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in Banias and in the central industrial city of Homs.

President Assad has, meanwhile, sent tanks deep into Syria’s third largest city Homs, escalating a military campaign to crush a seven-week-old uprising against his autocratic rule that spread across the country of 23 million people.

Syrians demanding political freedom and an end to corruption have held weeks of what they say are peaceful demonstrations in the face of government repression, despite a civilian death toll that has reached 800, according to the Syrian human rights organization Sawasiah.

On Sunday, Homs residents told Reuters they heard machinegun fire and shelling as troops made their first incursion into residential areas of the city of one million people, 165 kilometers (100 miles) north of Damascus.

At least one person, a 12-year-old child, was killed when tanks and troops charged into the Bab Sebaa, Bab Amro and Tal al-Sour districts of Homs overnight, the Observatory said.

“The areas have been under total siege since yesterday. There is a total blackout on the numbers of dead and injured, telecommunications and electricity are repeatedly being cut in those districts,” the Observatory said in a statement.

Elsewhere, a witness said security forces killed at least two unarmed demonstrators on Sunday when they fired on a night rally in the eastern city of Deir al-Zor.

Meanwhile, Syrian authorities have stopped a UN humanitarian team from visiting the protest city of Daraa where hundreds are said to have been killed in a government crackdown, AFP reported a UN spokesman as saying on Monday.

“The UN humanitarian assessment mission has not been able to get into Daraa,” UN deputy spokesman Farhan Haq told reporters.

“We are trying to clarify why it hasn't had access. We are also trying to get access to other areas of Syria,” Mr. Haq said.

The United Nations announced last Thursday that Syria had agreed to let a UN team into Daraa, after UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon appealed directly to Mr. Assad.

Mr. Ban also urged President Assad to cooperate with a UN Human Rights Council inquiry into the clampdown on protests and carry out “bold” reforms.

President Assad, 46, who has maintained the autocratic political system inherited from his late father, President Hafez al-Assad, had made vague promises of reforms, but when that failed to stop the protests, he made clear he would not tolerate dissent or risk losing the tight control his family has had over geopolitically strategic Syria for the last 41 years.

The pro-democracy upheaval that began in Deraa on March 18, inspired by similar revolts across the Arab world, intensified last Friday across Hauran, an agricultural belt bordering Jordan to the south and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights to the west.

In the south, tanks swept into several towns on Sunday. A man was killed when security forces smashed their way into his home in the southern town of Tafas, a rights campaigner in the region said.

“Two models have emerged during this Arab democratic revolution: Egypt and Tunisia, where there is an established concept of the state and of the army as an institution of the state ... and the Libyan and Yemeni model,” Adnan Abu Oudeh, a Jordian statesman, told Reuters.

“Syria belongs to the latter,” said Mr. Abu Oudeh, who is a board member of the International Crisis Group, an independent conflict resolution group.

Protesters are demanding political freedoms, an end to corruption and the departure of President Assad, and deny his accusation that they are part of a foreign conspiracy determined to cause sectarian strife.

Syrian authorities have blamed the nearly two months of protests on “armed terrorist groups” they say are operating in Deraa, Banias, Homs and other parts of the country.

The official state news agency said an “armed gang,” a term used of opponents of the government, had ambushed a bus near Homs and shot dead 10 civilian workers returning from Lebanon.

Until the uprising began, Mr. Assad had been emerging from a period of isolation by the West for defying the United States over Iraq and reinforcing its informal anti-Israel alliance with Iran—a link that had worried Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority.

The West had been working to end President Assad’s international isolation to wean Damascus off its Iranian alliance and encourage peace moves with Israel, but his crackdown on dissent has put that rapprochement on hold.

(Dina Al-Shibeeb of Al Arabiya can be reached at: [email protected]. Abeer Tayel of Al Arabiya can be reached at: [email protected])