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President Assad is determined to crush the 6-week-old revolt.
A Syrian Kurdish protester shows his palms as he shouts anti-Syrian President Bashar Assad slogans on Monday.
AP PHOTO
Syrian troops went door-to-door in cities and towns across the nation Monday, arresting scores of people in a campaign of intimidation aimed at crushing an uprising against President Bashar Assad’s authoritarian regime, activists said.
Rami Abdul-Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said hundreds of people had been arrested over the past two days alone.
“The arrests are ongoing, from the besieged southern city of Daraa to the country’s north and passing through the suburbs of Damascus,” he said.
Assad is determined to crush the 6-week-old revolt, which began in Daraa and quickly spread across the nation of some 23 million people. Rights groups say at least 545 Syrians have been killed since the uprising began in March.
Now, the once-unimaginable protests are posing the most serious challenge to four decades of rule by the Assad family in one of the most repressive countries in the Middle East.
“It seems the authorities have taken an undeclared decision to kill off the uprising using security and military means,” said Abdul-Rahman, who is based in London.
Daraa, a drought-plagued city, has been under siege for a week since the regime sent in troops backed by tanks and snipers to crush protests. Electricity, power and fuel have been cut and the military has largely sealed off the area.
“I have never been so scared in all my life,” said one Daraa resident who fled late Sunday to an area some 10 miles away.
“Security men have divided Daraa into four parts … there was indiscriminate shelling yesterday, people are terrified,” he said Monday. “It’s like a military barracks there.”