Syria blames "gang" for violence that killed "four"
Wednesday, 23 March 2011
After popular revolutions succeeded to topple Tunisia's president Zine El Abedine Ben Ali and forced Egypt's strongman Hosni Mubarak to step down, Syria is currently battling with its growing protests challenging President Bashar al-Assad's Baathist rule.
Syrian forces killed at least six people on Wednesday in an attack on a mosque in the southern city of Deraa, site of unprecedented protests, residents said.
Syria blamed an "armed gang" for violence which erupted near the mosque in Deraa and said that only four people died, SANA news agency reported.
"An armed gang after midnight attacked a medical team in an ambulance at the Omari mosque, killing a doctor, a paramedic and the driver," the official news agency said.
"The security forces who were near the area intervened, hitting some and arresting others," the report said, without elaborating.
It added that a security force member was killed in the operation.
Syria has been under emergency law since the Baath Party took power in a 1963, banning any opposition and ushering in decades of economic retreat characterized by nationalization.
Dr Mahamid was shot by a sniper. The phone networks have been disrupted but we got through to people near the mosque on Jordanian mobile phone lines 
Those killed included Ali Ghassab al-Mahamid, a doctor from a prominent Deraa family who went to the Omari mosque in the city's old quarter to help victims of the attack, which occurred just after midnight, said the residents, declining to be named.
Before the attack, electricity was cut off in the area and telephone services were severed. Cries of "Allahu Akbar (God is the greatest)" erupted across neighborhoods in Deraa when the shooting began.
The protesters, who erected tents in the mosque's grounds, said earlier they were going to remain at the site until their demands were met.
The mosque's preacher, Ahmad Siasneh, told Al Arabiya on Tuesday that the mosque protest was peaceful.
The attack brought to 10 the number of civilians killed by Syrian forces during six days of demonstrations calling for political freedoms and an end to corruption in the country of 20 million.
Latest in string of uprisings
Daraa, a town about 100 kilometers (60 miles) south of Damascus and home to large tribal families, has been the focal point of the rallies, the latest in a string of uprisings against long-running autocratic regimes in the Arab world.
An AFP photographer and videographer in Daraa said their car was stopped in the old town and their equipment confiscated.
After being taken in for questioning, they received an apology from the authorities, but had still not received their equipment back.
No comment was immediately available from the government of Assad, facing the biggest challenge to his rule since succeeding his father Hafez al-Assad in 2000.
"Dr Mahamid was shot by a sniper. The phone networks have been disrupted but we got through to people near the mosque on Jordanian mobile phone lines," said one resident. Deraa is on the border with Jordan, according to Reuters.
A political activist, who also declined to be identified, said: "The old quarter is in total darkness and it is still difficult to know exactly what happened."
The attack occurred a day after the U.N. Office for Human Rights said the authorities "need to put an immediate halt to the excessive use of force against peaceful protesters, especially the use of live ammunition".
Protesters also gathered in the nearby town of Nawa.
On Tuesday, Vice President Farouq al-Shara said Assad was committed to "continue the path of reform and modernization in Syria", Lebanon's al-Manar television reported.
A main demand of the protesters is an end to what they term repression by the secret police, headed in Deraa province by a cousin of Assad.
Authorities arrested a leading campaigner who had supported the protesters, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. It said Loay Hussein, a political prisoner from 1984 to 1991, was taken from his home near Damascus.
Assad'a reforms
Assad has lifted some bans on private enterprise but has ignored demands to end emergency law, curb a pervasive security apparatus, develop rule of law, free political prisoners, allow freedom of expression, and reveal the fate of tens of thousands of dissenters who disappeared in the 1980s.
He has emerged in the last four years from isolation by the West over Syria's role in Lebanon and Iraq and backing for mostly Palestinian armed groups.
Assad strengthened Syria's ties with Shiite Iran as he sought to improve relations with the United States and strike a peace deal with Israel to regain the occupied Golan Heights, lost in the 1967 Middle East war.
Limited economic liberalization in the last decade has been marked by the rise of Rami Makhlouf, another cousin of Assad, as a business tycoon controlling key companies.
Makhlouf, under U.S. sanctions for what Washington deems public corruption, has been a target of protesters' anger. They describe him as a "thief". He says he is a legitimate businessman helping to bring economic progress to Syria.
EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said in a statement that the 27-nation bloc "strongly condemns the violent repression, including through the use of live ammunition, of peaceful protests in various locations across Syria."
The crackdown has resulted in the deaths of several demonstrators, wounded persons and arbitrary detentions "which is unacceptable", the statement said.
It also called for a Syrian interior ministry investigative committee to ensure those responsible for the death and injury of peaceful protesters in the city of Deraa to be held accountable.
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