Syria frees 300 detained in Banias as military tightens grip in other areas of unrest

Syrian security forces have released 300 people detained in the coastal city of Banias and restored basic services, a rights group said, within hours of the government saying the threat from protests was receding.

Tanks stormed residential areas of Banias last week, after President Bashar al-Assad deployed the military to crush dissent against three decades of Baath Party rule, having held out the prospect of political reform when unrest first erupted in March.


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, according to Reuters.

Human rights campaigners said at least six civilians, including four women, where killed in raids on Sunni neighborhoods in the mixed-faith city, and in an attack on an all-women demonstration just outside Banias on Saturday.

Bouthaina Shaaban, a presidential adviser, said security forces were reacting to armed militants who had manipulated “the legitimate demands of the people” calling them “a combination of fundamentalists, extremists, smugglers, people who are ex-convicts and are being used to make trouble.”

“I think now we've passed the most dangerous moment...I hope we are witnessing the end of the story,” Ms. Shaaban told a New York Times correspondent allowed into the country for a few hours. Most foreign journalists have been banned.

Until the uprising began, 46-year-old Mr. Assad -- from the minority Shiite 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.

“This regime is playing a losing card by sending tanks into cities and besieging them. Syrians have seen the blood of their compatriots spilt. They will never return to being non-persons,” prominent rights campaigner Suhair al-Atassi said from Damascus.

Mr. Atassi said a demonstration against President Assad’s autocratic rule erupted on Tuesday in Homs, Syria’s third city, despite a heavy security clampdown, after tanks stormed several neighborhoods on Sunday and three civilians were killed.

Another human rights campaigner in Homs said 1,500 people had fled their homes in three villages near the city where tanks had been deployed. One woman was killed by the military forces which swept into the area on Sunday, he told Reuters.

In the eastern city of Qamishli, around 1,000 people marched in a night demonstration demanding the lifting of the sieges of Homs, Banias and southern cities and towns encircled by tanks.

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 that 300 people had been detained since tanks entered Tafas on Saturday.

Officials have blamed most of the violence on “armed terrorist groups,” backed by Islamists and foreign agitators, and say around 100 soldiers and police have also been killed in the unrest.

United States officials said the first step in a new American approach toward the nation, of 23-million people, would be to declare that Mr. Assad has forfeited his legitimacy to rule, a policy shift that would amount to a call for regime change, The Associated Press reported.

The tougher US line almost certainly would echo demands for “democratic transition” that the administration used in Egypt and is now espousing in Libya, the officials said. But directly challenging President Assad's leadership is a decision fraught with problems: Arab countries are divided, Europe is still trying to gauge its response and there are major doubts over how far the United States could go to back up its words with action.

The Obama administration's policy deliberations were occurring against a backdrop of ongoing violence in Syria.

Thousands of Syrians have been detained in the past two months, including about 9,000 who are still in custody, said Ammar Qurabi, who heads the National Organization for Human Rights in Syria.

Mr. Qurabi told AP that the group has documented the deaths of 757 people.

“We urge the Syrian government to stop shooting protesters, to allow for peaceful marches and to stop these campaigns of arbitrary arrests and to start a meaningful dialogue,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Tuesday in Washington. He said Assad still had a chance to make amends, but acknowledged “the window is narrowing.”

Toner called the government's claims of reforms “false,” and demanded that the regime stop shooting protesters even as security forces entered new cities in southern Syria that had been peaceful until now.

Syria has a history of deadly crackdowns. President Assad's father, Hafez al-Assad, crushed a Sunni uprising in 1982 by shelling the central town of Hama, killing 10,000 to 25,000 people, according to Amnesty International estimates. Conflicting figures exist and the Syrian government has made no official estimate.

(Abeer Tayel of Al Arabiya