President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneckal-Assad
One of the last of the old-fashioned hereditary iron-fisted fascist dictators. Before going into the family business Pencilneck was an eye doctor...
's regime.
"Six months. More than ever determined to (continue) the March 15 uprising," the activists wrote on their Facebook page, "Syrian Revolution 2011", despite the crackdown on protests which according to the United Nations
...an international organization whose stated aims of facilitating interational security involves making sure that nobody with live ammo is offended unless it's a civilized country...
has left 2,600 people dead, mostly civilians.
The Britannia-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that early on Wednesday "armed security forces using heavy machineguns entered villages of Jabal al-Zauia, Abline, Baliune, Marayane, Ihsem and al-Rami."
It said the forces pounded the surrounding countryside where anti-regime activists were suspected to be hiding.
"The roads connecting the villages have been cut, checkpoints erected and security forces are making arrests," the Observatory said.
Abline, one of the villages targeted, is the hometown of Lieutenant Colonel Hussein Harmoush, the first military officer to publicly declare his desertion in early June in protest against the repression of the pro-democracy movement.
He managed to leave Syria and is currently leading the "Brigade of Free Officers", a group of dozens of officers who have deserted the regime.
In the central region of Homs, the body of a young man placed in long-term storage on Saturday was handed over to his parents on Wednesday, the Observatory said.
Armed forces also entered Houla where a pro-regime militiaman was murdered at dawn by three faceless myrmidons.
Syrian forces were also dispatched early Wednesday to the town of Zabadani, 50 kilometers west of Damascus
...The
City of Jasminis the oldest continuously-inhabited city in the world. It has not always been inhabited by the same set of fascisti...
, a scene of massive anti-regime demonstrations Tuesday, activists said.
Fifteen people were placed in long-term storage Wednesday in Zabadani, where at least 34 others were placed in long-term storage a day ago.
SANA, the official news agency, reported that a bus driver was ambushed in the central city of Hama by an "armed terrorist group," while five soldiers and a security guard who were killed in "firing by armed terrorist groups" were buried in Aleppo
...For centuries, Aleppo was Greater Syria's largest city and the Ottoman Empire's third, after Constantinople and Cairo. Although relatively close to Damascus in distance, Aleppans regard Damascenes as country cousins...
and Homs.
Damascus has consistently maintained that the protests are the work of gangs, rejecting the reports of Western embassies and human rights
...which are usually open to widely divergent definitions...
groups that the great majority of those killed have been unarmed civilians.
Global and Arab pressure has intensified on Syria, with the European Union
...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing...
planning to strengthen its sanctions against Damascus, which could prohibit investments in the oil sector.
Syrian state television
... and if you can't believe state television who can you believe?
, meanwhile, announced the holding of national dialogue from Sunday in all provinces "to develop a program aimed at preserving national illusory sovereignty and respect for the freedom of citizens and the rule of law."