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Erdogan Posters In Banias
[Dawn] Security forces have released 300 people jugged in Banias and restored basic services in the coastal city stormed by tanks last week, a human rights...which often intentionally defined so widely as to be meaningless... group said. Water, telecommunications and electricity had been restored, but tanks remained in major streets, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Tuesday. Two hundred people, including pro-democracy protest leaders were still in jail, it said. "Scores of those released were severely beaten and subjected to insults. A tank deployed in the square where demonstrations were being held," Observatory director Rami Abdelrahman said. Human rights campaigners said at least six civilians, including four women, where killed in raids on Sunni neighbourhoods and in an attack on an all-women demonstration just outside Banias on Saturday. Until the uprising began, Assad -- from the minority Shi'ite Alawite sect -- had been emerging from Western isolation after defying the United States over Iraq and reinforcing an anti-Israel bloc with Iran, increasing Syrian Sunni concerns. Demonstrators in Banias had raised posters of Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, who has had close ties to Assad, but disputed the official Syrian account of the violence. Erdogan said more than 1,000 civilians had died and he did not want to see a repeat of the 1982 Hama violence or the 1988 gassing of Iraqi Kurds in Halabja, when 5,000 people died. Officials have blamed most of the violence on "armed terrorist groups", backed by Islamists and foreign agitators, and say about 100 soldiers and police have been killed. In southern Syria, four civilians in the southern town of Tafas were killed as security forces widened a campaign of arrests, a human rights campaigner in the region said, adding 300 people had been jugged since tanks entered Tafas on Saturday. Posted by: Fred 2011-05-12 |
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