Government forces including snipers on rooftops tightened their grip on Syria's third largest city on Monday after President Bashar al-Assad sent in tanks in a sharpening crackdown on protests against his authoritarian rule. A human rights campaigner in Homs said the snipers deployed in several residential neighbourhoods as the sound of gunfire died down in districts of the city that tanks stormed on Sunday.
"There are snipers visible on rooftops of private and public building in al-Adawiya, Bab Sebaa and al-Mreijah neighbourhoods. Hundreds have fled from three villages just to the south-west of Homs where tanks had deployed," the campaigner said. Homs, the hometown of Assad's Western-educated wife Asma, lies in the middle of an agricultural region on the highway between Damascus and Syria's second largest city Aleppo. One of Syria's two oil refineries is in Homs. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said three civilians were killed on Sunday in Homs, a merchant city of one million people 165 km (100 miles) north of Damascus. Scores of people were arrested in Homs and in Banias on the Mediterranean coast, the latest focus of Assad's escalating military swoop on protesters, as well as in other regions, the Observatory said.
"Across Syria it has continued today, swelling the numbers (of detainees), which are already in the thousands," a spokesman for the Britain-based group said, adding that up to 500 people have been arrested in Banias since tanks entered on Saturday. Syria's upheaval began on March 18 when protesters, inspired by revolts across the Arab world, marched in the southern city of Deraa. Assad initially responded with vague promises of reform, and last month lifted a 48-year-old state of emergency.
But when the demonstrations persisted he sent the army to crush public dissent, first in Deraa and then in other cities, making clear he would not risk losing the tight control his family has held over Syria for the past 41 years. The Syrian Observatory said 621 civilians had been killed since protests first broke out. Another Syrian human rights group, Sawasiah, puts the civilian death toll at over 800.
A Western diplomat last week estimated that around 7,000 people had been detained, but the Observatory said another 400 and 500 were taken into custody since then in Banias alone. Before the uprising, Assad had been emerging from a period of Western isolation imposed because of Syria's support for militant groups Hezbollah and Hamas and its informal anti-Israel alliance with Israel. The United States had also accused Syria of allowing militants into Iraq to support the insurgency against US and Iraqi forces there.
Washington announced new sanctions against Syrian figures last month while the European Union last week agreed to impose asset freezes and travel restrictions against up to 14 Syrian officials it said were responsible for the violent repression. But political analysts and opposition leaders say sanctions alone are unlikely to deter Assad, in power since the death in 2000 of his father Hafez al-Assad, who ruled for 30 years, from using force to quell the unrest.
In the south, tanks swept into several towns on Sunday. A man was killed when security forces smashed their way into his home in the southern town of Tafas, a rights campaigner said. Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb, head of Egypt's highest Islamic authority, al-Azhar, was quoted by the state newspaper Al Ahram as calling on Assad to "stop shedding the blood of his people, cease attacks on civilians and end the siege his forces are imposing around a number of Syrian cities".
Protesters are demanding political freedoms, an end to corruption and the departure of Assad, and deny his assertion that they are part of a foreign conspiracy determined to cause sectarian strife. Assad is from the minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shia Islam, while the majority of Syria's 20 million population is Sunni Muslim. Alawites dominate Syria's power structure. Syrian authorities have blamed the nearly two months of protests on "armed terrorist groups" they say killed civilians and security personnel and are operating in Deraa, Banias, Homs and other parts of the country.