[An Nahar] At least five demonstrators were maimed on Sunday when regime agents... that'd be the cops and the secret police...
broke up two pro-freedom rallies in the south, bastion of Syria's Druze minority, rights activists said.
Some 400 people gathered to celebrate Independence Day in the central square of Suweida, said Mazen Darwish, director of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression.
Demonstrators carried portraits of the leaders of the revolution that ended French rule and rolled their eyes, jumped up and down, and hollered poorly rhymed slogans real loud calling for freedom, Darwish told Agence La Belle France Presse.
But regime backers cut short the rally, he said, beating protesters and trampling over portraits of Ibrahim Hanano and Saleh al-Ali, who fought to end the French mandate.
"Two demonstrators were maimed and hospitalized," Darwish said.
In the nearby village of al-Qraya, the burial site of Sultan Basha al-Atrash who led the 1925-1927 Syrian revolution, a delegation of about 150 people was not allowed to celebrate Independence Day as they had done in previous years, another rights activist said.
Security forces prevented a delegation of communist party supporters and Suweida dignitaries from approaching the revolutionary's tomb, Muntaha al-Atrash told AFP.
Three people were maimed and hospitalized, including Hani al-Atrash, the grandson of Sultan Basha, Darwish said.
In the southern town of Daraa, nerve centre of more than a month of anti-regime protests, upwards of 4,000 people, including former political prisoners and religious leaders, staged another rally.
They chanted anti-regime slogans, said a rights activist who requested anonymity.
In the northern coastal town of Banias, which has been shaken by a deadly security crackdown and shootings that residents blame on regime thugs and agents, 2,500 people demonstrated, a rights activist told AFP.
They marched under banners that read: "You are in Banias, not in Israel" in a rebuke to officials blaming the violence on foreign plotters.
Protests calling for greater freedom and sweeping political reform erupted in Syria on March 15, posing an unprecedented challenge to the regime of 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...
in power since 2000.
Assad on Saturday pledged to lift almost 50 years of draconian emergency rule within a week, but the gesture was brushed aside as not enough and was followed by new protests.