Massacre in Syria: Regime seeks to end protests before Ramadan. By Ray Moseley

The massacres unleashed by Syrian President Bashar Al Assad’s regime this weekend represent an all-out military attempt to quell widespread protests before the beginning of Ramadan on Monday, according to a leading Syrian dissident in London.

During Ramadan, Muslims fast during the day and go to their mosques at night to pray. The fear among regime officials, said Ausama Monajed, is that huge numbers will come out of the mosques at night to mount even larger protests against President Assad’s authoritarian regime than has been the case previously.

“At night people feel safer. It is easier to disperse and hide,” he said.

Mr. Monajed, a former United Nations and former European Union official, said the regime had recently been trying to discourage people from going to mosques during Ramadan, telling them that, because of a heat wave, they should pray at home.

“People have lost their fear. They don’t feel the regime’s authority any more,” he said.

The mass killings in Hama and other cities, he said, will be followed by “huge funerals” on Monday, which will lead to more protesters taking to the streets.

“What do they expect will happen then?” he said. “It is utterly insane. They don’t learn that brutal force doesn’t work.”

Mr. Monajed said he was in direct touch with a number of protesters inside Syria, who told him that more than 100 had been killed in Hama alone and 60 corpses were delivered to the city’s Horani hospital.

“A tank is perched in front of it, shooting at anything that moves,” he said.

But he said his sources told him that 10 tank crews defected and engaged regime armoured units, forcing them to retreat to the gates of the city.

Hama has been one of the focal points of the protests against the Assad regime that have continued for several months.

In February 1982, the Sunni population of Hama revolted against the Alawite-dominated regime of President Hafez al-Assad, father of Bashar, and the revolt was only put down after tens of thousands were killed, most of them civilians. The death toll has variously been estimated at 10,000 to 40,000.

Mr. Monajed said he had received reports that, since Saturday, more than 15 protesters had been killed and more than 60 injured in the town of Deir ez-Zour. Five areas of the town are completely cut off, he said, with snipers on roofs shooting at anything that moves.

He said army units defected on Saturday at al-Dura square in the town, and regime planes took off from Damascus to destroy their armored units. But he said this did not happen because the defectors left their equipment behind.

However, he said, regime forces shot and apparently killed the new mayor and military intelligence chief there.

Deraa and Homs also were attacked, but not as severely as Hama, he said. “They are ghost towns at the moment.”

Mr. Monajed said the regime’s simultaneous attacks on various cities will lead to wider demonstrations all over Syria, “as people are usually moved by the stories of their friends and relatives, not by strangers.”

The BBC reported that the US Embassy in Damascus had declared that “a full-on warfare” had been undertaken by the regime against its own people. Hospitals were reported to be running out of medicines and protesters have attacked and set fire to several police stations in Hama, according to the BBC.

(Ray Moseley is a London-based former chief European correspondent of the Chicago Tribune and has worked extensively in the Middle East. He can be reached at [email protected].)