By Khaled Yacoub Oweis
(Reuters) - Syrian troops raided houses in a Sunni district
of the besieged port of Latakia on Wednesday, arresting hundreds of people and
taking them to a stadium after a four-day tank assault to crush protests
against President Bashar al-Assad, residents said.
Assad's forces attacked
al-Raml, a seafront area named after a Palestinian refugee camp built in the
1950s, at the weekend as part of a fierce campaign to crush a five-month-old
uprising.
Some Palestinians have joined
in demonstrations against Assad, even though Syria hosts exiled leaders of the Islamist
Palestinian Hamas movement and other Palestinian groups.
Latakia is of particular
significance to Assad, from Syria's minority Alawite community. The 45-year-old
president, a self-declared champion of the Palestinian cause, comes from a
village to the southeast, where his father is buried. The Assad family, along
with friends, control the city's port and its finances.
"Shelling and the sound
of tank machineguns subsided today. They are bussing hundreds to the Sports
City from al-Raml. People who are picked up randomly from elsewhere in Latakia
are also being taken there," said a resident.
"Tanks are continuing to
deploy, they are now in the main Thawra (revolution) street," said the
resident, a university student who did not want to be identified.
CAMP DESERTED
Chris Gunness, spokesman for
the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, said three refugees
had been killed at the camp. Many had been wounded in the assault.
"UNRWA's information
indicates that most of the inhabitants have indeed left and that there are only
five to 10 vulnerable families remaining, unable to physically leave,"
Gunness said.
He said about 150 families had
fled to the city of Homs, in central Syria, where anti-Assad unrest has also
been put down.
Syrian forces killed nine
people in Homs on Wednesday, activists said, including two protesters shot dead
by pro-Assad militiamen, known as shabbiha, in front of the Fatima mosque in
the district of al-Waar after Ramadan prayers.
Syria has expelled most
independent media since the unrest began, making it difficult to verify reports
from the country.
Local activists said an
unknown number of refugees from Latakia had fled to the northwestern border
with Turkey,
which had received over 10,000 refugees from earlier assaults by Assad's forces
on Idlib province to the north of Latakia.
Turkey's Prime Minister
Tayyip Erdogan compared the situation in Syria with that in Libya, where rebels
have been fighting forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi since February.
"We have done our best
on Libya, but haven't been able to generate any results. So it's an
international issue now. Gaddafi could not meet our expectations, and the
outcome was obvious," Erdogan told reporters.
"Now the same situation
is going on in Syria. I've sent my foreign minister, and personally got in
touch many times, the last of them three days ago on the phone. In spite of all
this, civilians are still getting killed."
A diplomat in the Syrian
capital said: "The reports about detention conditions and torture are
increasingly alarming. Assad is backing himself more into a corner by using
more and more violence and turning more Syrians against him."
Assad, however, issued a
hardline message, telling ruling Baath Party officials: "Reform in Syria
springs from conviction... and not in response to any outside pressures.
The state news agency quoted
him as saying Syria was being targeted "to weaken its role in the
resistance (to Israel) and in defending legitimate Arab rights."
CHORUS OF CONDEMNATION
Assad had sought to improve
his image internationally in recent years by emphasizing economic reforms,
engaging in peace talks with Israel and accepting Western overtures to lessen
his isolation in return for cooperating on Lebanon and Iraq.
But he also strengthened ties
with Iran and the Lebanese Shi'ite guerrilla
group Hezbollah, his two remaining solid allies, to the disquiet of Syria's
Sunni Muslim population.
Assad's crackdown has caused a
chorus of international condemnation. "The bloodshed has to stop, first
and foremost," Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said. "If the
operations continue in Syria and the operations become a regional problem
Turkey can naturally not remain indifferent."
Citing witnesses in Latakia,
the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said a force of around 700 security
personnel fanned across the al-Raml district, with houses demolished there
"on the pretext they lacked construction permits."
"The Sports City's
stadiums are serving to house refugees and prevent them from fleeing outside
Latakia, and as we have seen in other cities that were assaulted, as a
detention center," Observatory Director Rami Abdelrahman told Reuters.
The Syrian Revolution Coordinating
Union, an activists' group, said Assad's forces killed two people in Latakia --
a woman called Badriya al-Najjar and a 28-year-old Palestinian refugee --
bringing the death toll to 38 in five days.
Syrian authorities blame
others for the violence, saying terrorist groups" have killed 500 soldiers
and police. Rights organizations say at least 1,700 civilians have been killed
by security forces since protests erupted in March.
(Additional reporting by
Allyn Fisher in Jerusalem; Editing by Alistair Lyon)
Source : Reuters
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