"The number of deaders has risen to 24," the Local Coordination Committees, the main activist network spurring protests on the ground, said on its Facebook page.
The LCC also said that dissident soldiers killed a general after refusing his order to fire on civilians in Hama, a hotbed of opposition against
Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneckal-Assad.
The Scourge of Hama...
"A military intelligence general, Adel Mustafa, was killed by soldiers who refused to fire against civilians in the Bab Qebli neighborhood," said the LCC.
Likewise, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britannia-based watchdog, reported the death of a general in Hama, noting that a lieutenant was also killed in the central city. It said he was killed by deserters.
Meanwhile,
...back at the Esquimeau village our hero was receiving a quick lesson in aeronautics......
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...
, demonstrations disintegrated into festivities pitting students against pro-regime militias -- locally known as shabiha -- in the university's science faculty.
Earlier on Thursday, security forces killed four leading freedom fighters in an ambush in northwestern Idlib province, the Observatory said.
The activists, who had gone into hiding with armed opponents of the Damascus
...Capital of the last remaining Baathist regime in the world...
government, were rubbed out in the Zawiya hills close to the border with Turkey, the Britannia-based watchdog said, without immediately releasing their names.
Elsewhere, one civilian was killed and seven others maimed during shelling of Bab Houd, a neighborhood of the flashpoint central city of Homs, said the Observatory.
In the eastern protest hub of Deir al-Zour, the body of a young man placed in long-term storage after being shot during an anti-regime protest was found.
Government troops shot and maimed a soldier who tried to defect at a security checkpoint in Dael, in the restive southern province of Daraa, said the watchdog.
The U.N. says more than 5,400 people have been killed since March.
The Assad regime has waged a fierce crackdown on dissent since protests erupted in mid-March, dispatching troops and militias to protest hotbeds in a bid to silence the opposition.