Syrian protesters erupted into the streets on Friday as the government accused rebels of carrying out a "brutal massacre" of 25 of its supporters, and activists said regime forces killed at least 55 people across the country.The independent Syrian Observatory for Human Rights gave a higher toll for the pro-regime losses, saying at least 26 government supporters -- most of them members of the feared shabiha militia -- had been killed.
The Britannia-based watchdog also reported that government forces met the demonstrators with hot lead in the northern city of 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...
killing nine, as activists called nationwide protests.
The Local Coordination Committees, the main activist group spurring protests on the ground, said regime forces killed 55 people across the country, among them five children and two women.
It said 13 people were killed in the central province of Homs, 11 in the northern province of Aleppo, 10 in the countryside around Damascus
...Capital of the last remaining Baathist regime in the world...
, eight in the southern province of Daraa, seven in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor, three in the western province of Latakia, two in the capital Damascus and one in the northwestern province of Idlib.
In the capital, troops fired on demonstrators in the upscale district of Mazzeh, the Observatory said, without giving any immediate word on casualties.
Protesters in other areas of Damascus and its suburbs were also fired on, the Observatory said, adding that two children were rubbed out in two different areas of Damascus province, although not at demonstrations.
In Syria's third largest city Homs, residents held a small protest despite a renewed bombardment by government forces of rebel-held neighborhoods, activists said.
The bombardment scuppered a new Red Thingy attempt to evacuate trapped civilians as the United Nations
...When talk is your weapon it's hard to make yourself heard over the sound of artillery...
said up to 1.5 million people needed aid.
It came after at least 168 were killed in violence across Syria on Thursday, the highest single-day corpse count since a U.N.-backed ceasefire was supposed to take effect on April 12, the Observatory said.
In the reported massacre, "armed terrorist groups... kidnapped a number of citizens in Daret Azzeh area in the countryside of Aleppo, according to official sources in the province," the state SANA news agency said.
"The terrorist groups... committed a brutal massacre against the citizens... through shooting them dead and then mutilating their bodies," it added.
"Initial information indicates that more than 25 of the kidnapped citizens were killed... with the fate of the rest of the kidnapped people still unknown."
Amateur video posted on YouTube and distributed by the Observatory showed piles of mangled bodies of young men, their clothing soaked in blood. At least two of the bodies in the footage were wearing fatigues.
"These are shabiha of (President) Bashir al-Assad's regime," the narrator said, without identifying himself.
The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), meanwhile, said up to 1.5 million Syrians now need humanitarian aid, up from the one million estimated at the end of March.
"The humanitarian situation in Syria continues to tank," said the latest OCHA bulletin.
Turkey on Friday denied reports it was shipping weapons to fighters of the rebel Free Syrian Army. "Turkey does not ship weapons to any neighboring country, including Syria," foreign ministry spokesperson Selcuk Unal said.
The BBC, for its part, reported that Britannia has refused to grant the head of the Syrian Olympic Committee a visa to travel to London for next month's Games.
General Mowaffak Joumaa's application was refused because of his links to the Assad government, even though his name does not appear on a European Union
...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing...
list of Syrian officials banned from traveling to the bloc, the BBC reported.
And La Belle France called for more defections from the Syrian armed forces after the high-profile flight of a MiG fighter pilot to neighboring Jordan on Thursday.
"Yesterday's defection leads us to call on members of the Syrian army and security forces to continue these defections, these desertions, and no longer to obey the Damascus regime's criminal orders," a foreign ministry front man said.
Jordan granted Colonel Hassan Hammadeh asylum after he made an emergency landing at Mafraq base near the border.
On Friday, the Turkish army said it lost radar and radio contact with one of its aircraft over the Mediterranean near neighboring Syria.
"Search and rescue efforts have started immediately," the general staff said adding that it was not immediately clear if the plane crashed or if there were casualties.