DAMASCUS, Aug 11, (Agencies): Syrian forces killed at least 14 people on Thursday, with the army storming two more towns in pursuit of anti-regime protesters, defying Western calls for an end to violence after a “chilling” UN Security Council briefing.
The killings occurred soon after columns of tanks entered the town of Qusayr in the central province of Homs early on Thursday, sending residents fleeing into the fields, rights activist there said.
“The security forces opened fire on residents who tried to flee to the Al-Basateen district, killing at least five” one activist told AFP in Nicosia, adding later that the death toll rose to eleven.
Another activist said dozens of people had been wounded, adding that the army “has closed entrances to the town,” while security forces made around “one hundred arrests”, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported.
Three other people were shot dead by security forces in the eastern oil hub of Deir Ezzor’s Al-Matar neighbourhood and several houses were torched, the Britain-based rights group said.
Tanks, troop carriers and buses transporting security force members also sped into the town of Saraqeb in the northwestern Idlib province bordering Turkey soon after dawn Thursday, the Observatory reported.
“Shooting was heard soon afterwards,” it said, adding that security were “raiding homes and making arrests, rounding up more than 100 people, including 35 children.”
“Army troops are smashing the doors of shops owned by activists in search of them, and they have cut off electricity in the town,” where anti-regime protests have been held nightly, said the Observatory.
On Wednesday, security forces shot dead 18 people in the Baba Amro neighbourhood of the city of Homs with more than 100 wounded “some in critical condition,” the group said.
It said residents were fleeing for safety while heavy machine-gun fire rattled Baba Amro well into Thursday morning.
The group also reported that security forces arrested 27 activists Wednesday in the town of Salamiyeh and nearby villages, in the province of Deir Ezzor, including prominent dissident and protest organiser Hassan Zahra.
Rights group say more than 2,000 people have been killed in the crackdown on the protest movement, which first erupted in mid-March with calls for reform before demanding the fall of the regime over its bloody repression.
The Observatory said on its website that a total of 2,150 people have been confirmed dead since the protests began, including 1,744 civilians and 406 security forces.
That toll, it said, excludes “martyrs who fell in Hama since August 3.”
The flashpoint Syrian city of Hama was silent Thursday with only a few people on the streets, a Turkish Anatolia news agency reporter on the scene said, in the wake of a bloody military incursion.
The United States, after weeks of hesitation, has finally decided to call explicitly for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down amid broadening pressure to staunch the bloodshed.
The announcement, which US officials said is expected late Thursday, would come as President Barack Obama’s administration presses for tougher international sanctions on a regime bent on crushing a pro-democracy movement.
“The United States is looking to explicitly call for Assad to step down. The timing of that is still in question,” a US official told AFP on the condition of anonymity.
“It’s part of steps to increase the pressure given the ongoing brutality of the Assad regime.”
Abdel Karim Rihawi, the head of the Syrian League for the Defence of Human Rights, was arrested on Thursday, activists told AFP.
He was arrested at 3:00 pm (1200 GMT) in the Havana cafe in Damascus, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told AFP in Nicosia, addding they had not heard from him since the arrest.
The Syrian ambassador to the UN rejected European criticism of his government’s crackdown on Wednesday and compared the protests in his country to this week’s riots in Britain. A British envoy immediately branded the comparison as “absurd.”
“It’s very informative to hear the prime minister of England describing the riots and the rioters in England by using the term gangs,” Ambassador Bashar Ja’afari told reporters. “They don’t allow us to use the same term for the armed groups and the terrorist groups in my country. This is hypocrisy. This is arrogance.
“London, Birmingham, Bristol is only 1 percent of what happened in some restive areas of my country,” Ja’afari said.
Britain’s deputy ambassador Philip Parham, who addressed reporters alongside other European envoys earlier in the evening, returned to the microphone outside Security Council chambers to reject Ja’afari’s statements as an “absurd comparison.”
Parham said the British government is handling the riots with “measured, proportionate, legal, transparent steps to restore the rule of law.” In Syria, “you have a situation where thousands of unarmed civilians are being attacked and killed,” Parham said.
Emerging powers India, Brazil and South Africa urged Syria’s regime to show restraint and respect for human rights at a meeting in Damascus with President Bashar al-Assad, a joint statement said Thursday.
The countries “called for an immediate end to all violence and urged all sides to act with utmost restraint and respect for human rights and international human rights law”, the joint statement said.
Envoys from the three countries travelled to the Syrian capital for meetings on Wednesday with Assad and Foreign Minister Walid Muallem.
Egypt
Egypt has begun procedures to end the country’s three-decade old state of emergency, the government said on Thursday, a key demand of the protesters who toppled president Hosni Mubarak in February.
The ruling army council has promised to scrap the emergency law, which gave Mubarak’s hated police force sweeping powers to stifle dissent against his rule.
“The government has decided to start the procedures needed to end the state of emergency, in coordination with the military council,” cabinet spokesman Mohamed Hegazy said.
The cabinet said it would abide by a pledge to end the state of emergency before the start of the parliamentary elections, expected in November.
Egyptian rights campaigners have said the continued emergency powers were an anachronism in post-Mubarak Egypt that sapped the credibility of the interim government as a force for democratic change.
“The government confirms that since it has taken up its responsibilities, it has not taken any of the exceptional measures allowed under the state of emergency ... and has abided by normal legal procedures,” the cabinet said in a statement.
The emergency law allowed the police to hold people for months without charge. Amnesty International in April urged Egypt to scrap the law in a an 80-page report called “Time for Justice: Egypt’s corrosive system of detention”.
The rights group listed brutal treatment of Egyptians behind bars that included beatings, electric shocks, suspension by the wrists and ankles for long periods, sleep deprivation and death threats.
Mubarak-era officials brushed off concerns about human rights abuses as unproven allegations or isolated incidents that did not prove any pattern of abuse.
Mubarak, his two sons and former interior minister Habib el-Adli, now face trial on charges of graft and ordering the killing of protesters during the uprising. They deny the accusations.
Libya
Libyan rebels from the besieged city of Misrata attacked the nearby town of Tuarga on Thursday in an effort to end the barrage of missiles that hits their home town almost daily.
Commanders and soldiers said the rebels had pushed into the centre of Tuarga, around 40 kms (25 miles) south of Misrata in western Libya, at around 6:00 am (0400 GMT).
“They are firing rockets into Misrata every day,” said Tareq, a 26-year-old fighter who had pulled a few kms back from the front to fix his truck-mounted rocket launcher.
“Today is the day we stop them; today we moved inside Tuarga.”
On Tuesday night, at least three rockets slammed into Misrata, although no casualties were reported. But residents, who have been bombarded for months, uniformly blame the attacks on forces in Tuarga loyal to strongman Muammar Gaddafi.
Hajj Ali, commander of the Taliq Freedom Brigade — which in earlier battles stopped Gaddafi forces reaching Misrata’s port — said rebel forces were moving into the centre of Tuarga in a pincer from the west and east.
The rebels hope to cut of supply lines to the town and disrupt rocket positions, but Ali said they were moving cautiously.
“We have to be careful. It does not look like they have hostages, but there are a lot of snipers,” he said.
A few kms from the centre of Tuarga, batch after batch of outgoing rebel rocket fire could be seen thundering across the fields full of scarred, burnt and decapitated date palms toward loyalist positions.
Trucks piled high with ammunition raced in the same direction toward the front line.
But in the opposite direction a stream of ambulances told of the ferocity of the fighting.
Doctors at a nearby field clinic, and at Misrata’s main hospital, reported receiving many more wounded during the morning than they had in recent weeks.
Meanwhile, Stockholm police stormed the Libyan embassy Thursday and arrested seven people who had broken in and appeared likely to try to kill themselves or set fire to the building, police said.
“We tried to negotiate with these people, but came to realise that the negotiations would not succeed, and since there was a real danger that human lives could be lost and of serious material damage, we went in,” police spokesman Ulf Goeranzon told AFP.
“We arrested seven people. They have been removed from the building and they are now being interrogated at a police station,” he said, adding that all of those arrested were men, and that it remained unclear if more people had participated in the break-in.
Denmark decided Thursday to extend its participation in Nato operations in Libya for three months and to allow the rebel National Transitional Council to send envoys to Copenhagen.
Denmark’s multi-party Libya contact group announced at a news conference the Scandinavian country’s six F-16 fighter jets would continue participating in Nato bombing missions over Libya for another three-month renewable period after the current one expires later this month.
“There is a broad agreement that the strategy we have chosen is the right one,” Danish Foreign Minister Lene Espersen told AFP after the news conference.
More countries are likely to announce next week that they will free up frozen assets for the use of rebels in Libya, a British official said on Thursday, adding that economic and military pressure had left Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi “desperate”.
The senior official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said steps taken by the international community meant Gaddafi and his supporters were nearing a “tipping point” when they would be forced from power.
The official did not name the countries concerned, and the upbeat assessment was in contrast to an apparent military stalemate on the ground, where Libyan rebels have struggled to make inroads against Gaddafi’s forces despite nearly five months of Nato bombing of government targets.
Yemen
A nephew of President Ali Abdullah Saleh who commands a key paramilitary unit has called for talks to end Yemen’s political stand-off but threatened to “break the necks” of any faction that seeks again to remove Saleh by force.
Brigadier General Yehia Mohamed Abdullah Saleh, an important power broker as head of the Central Security Forces, also said Yemen would not slide anew into the open warfare seen in May after months of street protests aimed at toppling the president.
Saleh is recuperating in Saudi Arabia from wounds suffered in an assassination attempt during battles with tribal factions that levelled parts of the capital Sanaa.
A Yemeni government official said on Wednesday Saleh would reconsider a plan brokered by Gulf neighbours for him to hand over power. He has backed out of it three times, raising fears of a downward spiral into anarchy beneficial to al-Qaeda militants entrenched in the Arabian Peninsula state.
“There is no solution other than dialogue to put an end to this crisis,” Brigadier General Saleh said in an interview.
In an apparent reference to the forces of Sadeq al-Ahmar, a leader of one part of the powerful al-Hashed tribal confederation, and General Ali Mohsen, a longtime ally who turned on the president, General Saleh played down the risk of more fighting while vowing to prevail in it.
“Some forces are pushing for confrontations. I reassure the Yemenis that this will not happen,” he said. “The concerns about a civil war in Yemen are false, God willing,” he told Reuters.
“But if they resort to arms or force, they know we will break their necks. And we will break the neck of anyone who tries to damage or harm the security and stability of the nation.”
Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, recovering in Riyadh from bomb blast wounds, said a Gulf proposal for power transfer which he avoided signing in the past should be treated positively.
The embattled veteran leader, whose regime has been facing protests since January, said his ruling General People’s Congress party stresses the need to “continue to deal positively with the Gulf initiative,” Saba state news agency reported Thursday.
Saleh was speaking to members of his party who were visiting him at his residence in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, where he is convalescing, it said.
“The GPC is committed to look for solutions for the dispute with the opposition,” Saleh said, stressing the need to “find a mechanism to implement (the proposal) in a way that would guarantee a peaceful and smooth transfer of power.”
The president who has been in office since 1978, and whose term ends in 2013, insisted, however, that the implementation of the Gulf proposal should be done “in accordance with the constitution.”
The deal proposed by the Gulf Cooperation Council in April stipulated that Saleh would submit his resignation to parliament 30 days after passing power to his vice president, and tasking the opposition with forming a national unity government shared equally between the GPC and the opposition.
Presidential elections would follow two months later.