BEIRUT — Syrian security forces opened fire Friday on protesters and hunted them down in house-tohouse raids, killing about 30 people in the deadliest day in weeks in the country’s 7-month-old uprising, activists said.
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The popular revolt against President Bashar Assad’s regime has proved resilient, with protests occurring every week despite the near-certainty the government will respond with bullets and tear gas. The United Nations estimates that the regime crackdown on the protests has killed 3,000 people since March.
Much of the bloodshed Friday happened after the protests had ended and security forces armed with machine guns chased protesters and activists, according to opposition groups monitoring the demonstrations. Authorities disrupted telephone and Internet service, they said.
The Syrian opposition’s two main activist groups, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Local Coordinating Committees, gave figures for the protesters killed Friday that ranged from 29 to 37.
The flash points were Homs and Hama in central Syria, where opposition to the regime is strong. Hama is the site of a massacre nearly 30 years ago that has come to symbolize the ruthlessness of the Assad dynasty.
Rami Abdul-Rahman, the head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, saidsecurity forces in Homs were firing machine guns as they conducted raids in search of protesters and activists. In Hama, there were heavy clashes between the army and gunmen believed to be army defectors.
Syria has largely sealed off the country from foreign journalists and prevented independent reporting, making it difficult to confirm events. Key sources of information are amateur videos posted online, witness accounts and details gathered by activist groups.
Communications were spotty Friday in the Damascus suburb of Douma and in Homs. The move appeared to be an attempt to cut off the opposition’s ability to organize and report on the protests.
“There was a very fierce reaction to the protests in Homs today,” said Syria-based activist Mustafa Osso. Syrian forces opened fire as some 2,000 people gathered for protests, he said.
“There are many injured as well. Hospitals are having a hard time coping with the casualties,” Osso said.
Majd Amer, an activist in Homs, said sporadic gunfire could be heard as protesters poured out of mosques after Friday prayers.
The regime appears to lack sufficient numbers of loyal troops to garrison all the centers of unrest at the same time, so government forces will often sweep through an area in the wake of protests, breaking up new gatherings and hunting activists, before being deployed elsewhere.
On Friday, many protesters said they wanted a no-fly zone established over Syria to protect civilians in case the Syrian regime considers attacking protesters from the sky, the activist groups said.
The protesters also called for international monitors, although most opposition groups reject the idea of foreign military intervention.
The Syrian government insists the unrest is being driven by terrorists and foreign extremists looking to stir up sectarian strife.
During a rare authorized visit to Syria by a Western journalist, conducted under close government supervision, it became clear that not only do Assad and his allies appear to be in no imminent danger of falling, but that they also feel no pressure to offer concessions to those who have been taking to the streets for months to call for radicalchange.
Rather, the government is touting a package of limited changes that would leave the existing power of the state intact while focusing on crushing the remainder of the protest movement by force.
“The Syrian leadership is quite confident and very strong, and we feel sure that despite all the international campaigns against Syria, we will survive,” said Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal al-Miqdad. “Syria is secure ... and will be stronger after this crisis. It will be a new Syria. Give us time, and it will be reborn.”
Because Syria lies at the nexus of a web of overlapping regional, sectarian and ethnic conflicts among Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, Arabs and Israelis, the government is convinced that the West will not dare intervene militarily, as it did in Libya.
“Syria has a strong army, and Syria is not alone,” said Bassem Abu Abdullah, a professor of international affairs at Damascus University and a member of the dominant Baath Party. “Attacking Syria means regional war, because we will attack Israel directly. Hezbollah will participate. Iran will participate. This is not in the interests of Europe and America.”
NUCLEAR TALKS STALL
Syrian officials, meanwhile, have turned down a renewed request from U.N. nuclear inspectors to visit suspected secret nuclear sites. Talks earlier this week in Damascus failed to advance a probe of the Arab nation’s hidden atomic program, diplomats said Friday.
Meetings between Syrian and International Atomic Energy Agency officials Monday and Tuesday in Damascus had been highly anticipated after Syrian officials had pledged to end more than three years of stonewalling the agency’s inspectors.
The offer for cooperation came after the agency’s 35-nation board reported Damascus to the U.N. Security Council in June on the basis of an agency assessment that a facility destroyed by Israeli warplanes in 2007 was a nuclear reactor meant to produce plutonium when completed.
Damascus says the target was a non-nuclear military building but has refused to allow the agency’s officials to return to the site after an initial visit that produced samples with traces of uranium and other nuclear footprints.
It has also turned down agency requests to visit three other sites that the agency suspects are linked to what it describes as the destroyed reactor.
Agency officials have refused to comment on the trip, saying details will only be released to the board next month by agency chief Yukiya Amano. But diplomats from two of the agency’s member nations, who spoke on condition of anonymity because their information was privileged, said Friday that the trip had essentially been a failure.
EGYPTIAN INMATE DIES
Egyptian-rights activists Friday accused guards at a Cairo prison of killing an inmate by forcing water into his body with hoses in a case they said shows the continued use of torture by security forces despite the ouster of PresidentHosni Mubarak.
Popular anger over the use of torture was a key grievance behind the mass uprising that toppled Mubarak in February. Activists see the death of Essam Atta, 23, at a Cairo hospital late Thursday as an indication that Egypt’s new rulers have made little effort to stamp it out.
Malik Adly, a lawyer for the family, says that Atta had phoned his family before his death, to let them know that police had injected water into his body through his mouth and anus.
Other prisoners later informed the lawyer that Atta had thrown up blood and then died after the torture. A prison guard took Atta’s body to a hospital late Thursday, where he was pronounced dead from“unknown poisoning,” Adly said.
Atta had been arrested while watching a street fight in February, convicted of “thuggery” in a military trial in February and sentenced to two years in Cairo’s Tora prison.
“We accuse the officers of the Tora prison of being behind the victim’s death,” Adly said. Cairo’s Nadim Center for Victims of Torture also accused the guards of killing Atta.
An Egyptian security official denied the allegations, saying prison medics found that Atta had taken drugs and was suffering from exhaustion. When his condition worsened, he was taken to the hospital where he died.
Atta was arrested in 2004for drug dealing and in 2010 for illegal weapon possession, the official said. The two-year sentence he was serving at the time of his death was for squatting in a residential apartment, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the media.
BOMB KILLS YEMENI
A car bomb killed the head of the anti-terror force in Yemen’s restive southern Abyan province Friday, a Yemeni security official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk brief the media.
Three others, including two children, were wounded in the blast that killed Ali al-Haddi near the coastal city of Aden. The bomb was plantedin al-Haddi’s car, the official said.
Security has broken down across Yemen during the nine-month popular uprising against President Ali Abdullah Saleh. Demonstrations raged around the country Friday.
Al-Qaida-linked militants have taken over a number of towns in Abyan, where they regularly engage in deadly clashes with security forces. Yemeni authorities also accuse them of targeting security officials.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton heaped praise on the first Arab woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize and called for her movement to succeed in bringing democracy to Yemen.
Clinton welcomed Yemeni activist Tawakkul Karman in Washington on Friday and lauded her “commitment to democracy and human rights” and efforts to shape a better future for her country.
Alternating in English and Arabic, Karman said Yemen’s protesters would surprise the world by making a new state, just as they surprised the world with their revolution.
She also spoke of the hundreds of Yemeni women who protested the government’s crackdown by setting fire to their traditional veils earlier this week. She said Yemeni women would press their rights and no longer hide behind veils or walls.
Information for this article was contributed by Elizabeth A. Kennedy, George Jahn, Ben Hubbard, Gamal Abdul-Fattah and Bradley Klapper of The Associated Press and by Liz Sly of The Washington Post.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 10/29/2011