2 killed as Syrian forces hunt for defector

Syrian security forces searching for an alleged high-profile defector from President Bashar Assad’s regime killed two people after storming a northern village yesterday, raising the death toll from the past two days to at least 19, activists said.

A day earlier, security forces trying to crush almost six months of demonstrations against the authoritarian

leadership fired on thousands of marchers, killing 17 people, most of them in suburbs of the capital Damascus.

The crackdown has drawn international criticism and sanctions. The European Union announced Friday that it was banning oil imports from Syria, which will cost the embattled regime millions of dollars each day.

While Assad brushed off earlier condemnation as foreign meddling, the oil embargo is significant because Damascus gets about 28 percent of its revenue from the oil trade and sells fuel to France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. Some analysts believe Syria is getting financial assistance from Iran, which would cushion the EU blow.

The EU will do more, the bloc’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, said yesterday after meetings in Poland with top diplomats of member states. Ashton told reporters in Poland the ban on Syrian oil imports was an attempt to achieve a political outcome by economic means.

“And we will continue to put that pressure on, to look for ways of doing so, to try and support the people,’’ she said.

The United States has hit more than 30 Syrian officials, including Assad himself, with economic sanctions, banned any US import of Syrian oil or petroleum products, and frozen all Syrian government assets subject to American jurisdiction. But the United States has isolated Syria for decades and has little leverage with the regime.

Yesterday, US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland welcomed the EU oil import ban.

“The United States and our international partners will continue to add political and economic pressure in an effort to force President Assad to step aside and allow the Syrian people to effect a peaceful transition,’’ Nuland said.

The United Nations says some 2,200 people have been killed since March as protesters take to the streets every week, despite the near-certainty that they will face bullets and sniper fire. The regime is in no imminent danger of collapse, leading to concerns that violence will escalate.

In the Damascus suburb of Douma yesterday, thousands of mourners marched behind the body of a man killed by gunfire Friday. Mourners seen on video posted online by residents shouted “freedom’’ and “God is great.’’

Activists said troops yesterday raided a village near the town of Maaret al-Numan in the province of Idlib, killing two people.

The Local Coordination Committees activist network and the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported the deaths.

The Observatory cited a local activist saying troops taking part in yesterday’s raid in Idlib, an area close to the Turkish border, were searching for Adnan Bakkour, attorney general for the central Hama Province, who appeared in two videos Wednesday declaring his resignation.

Bakkour’s alleged resignation appeared to be a high-profile defection, but authorities said that terrorists had kidnapped him and forced him to make the recording. Bakkour denied that in one of the videos.

Crackdown escalates in east Syria, protesters killed

Syrian forces shot dead two pro-democracy protesters on Thursday in eastern provincial capital Deir al-Zoran, residents said, as a crackdown escalated against dissent in the tribal region bordering Iraq's Sunni heartland.

Military intelligence agents also injured seven protesters who had gathered in the main square of the city on the Euphrates river to protest against President Bashar al-Assad whose family has ruled Syria with an iron fist since 1970.
Ultra-loyalist army units also expanded a campaign to crush dissent in the northwestern province of Idlib bordering Turkey and in the city of Homs, where residents said two civilians were killed when security forces stormed the Bab Sebaa neighborhood.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said one soldier was also killed in the attack on the main residential district.
"A crowd of 1,500 had shown up for the usual noon demonstration despite the intense heat. Thousands more have descended on the square after the killings, and there are now around 10,000 people there," said one witness, a computer programer who declined to give his name for fear of arrest.
Despite being the center of Syria's modest oil production, Deir is among the poorest regions in the country of 20 million people.
The desert area has suffered water shortages for six years which experts say have been caused largely by mismanagement and corruption, and have decimated agricultural production.
Syrian authorities have allowed Sunni tribes in Deir al-Zor to carry arms against the threat seen posed by a Kurdish population further north.
MINORITY RULE
Assad, from Syria's Alawite minority sect, an offshoot of Islam, is struggling to put down spreading protests in rural and tribal regions, in suburbs of the capital and in cities such as Hama and Homs -- all demanding an end to his autocratic rule.
Mass arrests and the heavy deployment of security forces, including an irregular Alawite militia known as shabbiha, have prevented protests in central Damascus and the commercial hub of Aleppo.
Four villagers were killed on Wednesday in tank-backed assaults on at least four villages in the Jabal al-Zawya region in Idlib, activists said.
"We are seeing a military escalation following the regime's political escalation," said an activist in Idlib, referring to the thousands of arrests in a crackdown that has intensified in the last two weeks, according to human rights campaigners.
Among those arrested was physician Ahmad Tuma, a respected opposition leader from Deir, who was abducted from his clinic by Military Intelligence agents last week, his friends said.
Security forces arrested at least 30 people on Wednesday, including prominent film directors Nabil Maleh and Mohammad Malas, known for works chronicling malaise under Assad family rule, and actress May Skaf, during a pro-democracy protest in Damascus, rights organizations said.
They were among a group of artists who issued a declaration this week denouncing state violence against protesters and demanding accountability for the killings of civilians and the release of thousands of political prisoners held without trial.
International powers, including Turkey, have cautioned Assad against a repeat of massacres from the era of his father, the late President Hafez al-Assad, who crushed leftist and Islamist challenges to his rule, culminating in the killing of up to 30,000 people in the city of Hama in 1982.
The U.S. and French ambassadors visited Hama in a show of support last Friday. Three days later their embassies were attacked by Assad loyalists. No one was killed in the attacks which were condemned by the United Nations Security Council.

Ten Syrians killed in bus ambush

Syrian authorities have blamed armed gangs working for foreign governments for protests that started in mid-March against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

A Syrian opposition figure speaking to the German Press Agency DPA in Beirut on the condition of anonymity cast doubt on the official version that an armed gang carried out the attack near Homs, where the army and security presence has been heavy since Saturday.

“Who would have the courage to fire at the bus when there are hundreds of Syrian troops positioned in every street in Homs?” he asked.

He said that during the night, the military cut electricity and communications before deploying on every street in several districts of the western city in preparation for what he described as an “arrest operation.” “The authorities are searching for hundreds of people they want to arrest in Homs,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Rights groups have said more than 600 people have been killed and 8,000 jailed or gone missing in the crackdown on protesters since March. The Committee of the Martyrs of the 15 March Revolution said its tally of the dead was 708.