Syrian tanks in Turkey border village

Army tanks yesterday entered a village bordering Turkey, where 10,000 Syrians have sought refuge, an activist said, as Washington warned Damascus over its “continued brutality” against protesters.

With the deadly revolt now in its fourth month, Britain urged its nationals to leave Syria “now” by commercial means, warning that its embassy in Damascus was unlikely to be able to help in the event of a further deterioration.

As many as 19 people were killed in protests last Friday, the Local Coordination Committee of anti-government activists said, although it added that it had collected only 12 names so far.

The Syrian Revolution 2011 Facebook page, a driving force behind the protests, called for a general strike yesterday in the Damascus suburb of Douma and the countryside outside the capital.

Soldiers in at least six tanks and 15 troop transporters entered the border village of Bdama, widening the crackdown focused in the northwestern province of Idlib, activist Rami Abdel Rahman said.

The head of the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said “heavy gunfire” broke out in the village, a few kilometres north of the flashpoint town of Jisr al-Shughur.

Residents of Bdama had been supplying refugees fleeing across the border from the Jisr area, he said when contacted by telephone from Nicosia.

The number of refugees fleeing across the border into Turkey has now topped 10,000.

Turkey’s Anatolia news agency reported that the refugee figure rose after another 421 Syrians, mostly women and children, arrived at Turkish Red Crescent tent cities in the border province of Hatay.

Abdel Rahman said the deadliest incidents last Friday were in the central city of Homs where five people were shot dead.

About 5,000 protesters gathered in Homs, he said, adding demonstrations gripped several other cities and towns including Jableh in the west and in Suweida in the south, where club-wielding forces dispersed hundreds.

Abdel Rahman said thousands of people attended a funeral in Homs yesterday for some of those killed, and that mourners at a funeral in Douma staged a sit-in at the main mosque.

Washington is weighing up whether war crimes charges can be brought against Damascus to pressure the government to end its bloody crackdown on dissent, a senior administration official said.

Other measures, including sanctions targeting Syria’s oil and gas sector, are being considered as part of a broader diplomatic campaign to increase pressure on President Bashar al-Assad.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton yesterday urged a transition to democracy in Syria, writing in the pan-Arab London-based Arabic-language Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper that the crackdown would not quell the momentum for change.