Syria in dawn crackdown ahead of protester funerals

Syrian security forces arrested 37 people yesterday, a day after nine people were killed as thousands of pro-reform protesters took to the streets on the Muslim day of rest.

The wave of raids targeted the southern town of Daraa, one of the main centres of more than two weeks of demonstrations, as well as Douma north of Damascus and the northern industrial city of Homs.

“There is an arrest campaign and dozens have been detained,” a resident of Douma, 15 km from the capital, where violence the previous day killed at least nine and left scores wounded, told AFP.

He added the agricultural town was calm despite security forces withholding some of the corpses from the previous day’s violence in an apparent bid to prevent funerals from sparking fresh protests.

Families decided against burying four of the dead yesterday although life in the city was back to normal, with shops open and a ‘usual’ deployment of security forces.

A witness told AFP security forces had used live ammunition to break up stone-throwing protesters after weekly Muslim prayers last Friday.

Syrian authorities denied the security forces were responsible for the deaths, blaming them on an “armed group” which opened fire from rooftops in the town on both demonstrators and police officers.

They acknowledged there were an unspecified number of deaths and said dozens were wounded, some of them police.

State television charged that “some of the demonstrators had daubed their clothes with red dye to make foreign reporters believe that they had been injured”.

Some 200 people demonstrated outside the courthouse of Daraa, a tribal town near the border with Jordan, where security forces arrested eight people between a morning raid and a round up after protests, an activist told AFP.

A 20-year-old who was killed by security forces during a protest in Sanamein, just outside Daraa, was to be buried in nearby Inkhel, a human rights activist said.

He was one among as many as three people killed during Friday’s protest in the village. The official SANA news agency said a soldier was also seriously wounded in Daraa itself when young men tried to snatch his weapon.

Ahead of the funeral, security forces carried out a series of raids in the area.