Syria presses crackdown, army enters border village

Syrian tanks yesterday rolled into a village on the border with Turkey, where workers are scrambling to erect a huge tent city anticipating a new exodus of refugees from the crackdown.

“The army backed by tanks and troop carriers entered Al-Najia as part of its deployment in the province of Idlib,” the head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Rami Abdel Rahman, told AFP in Nicosia.

Al-Najia is on the road linking the northwestern city of Latakia to Jisr al-Shughhur – home to 50,000 people, most of whom fled after the army seized the town on June 12, with many crossing into Turkey.

The latest operation came just days after the army moved into Khirbet al-Joz, another village near the border, and amid EU condemnation of Syria’s resort to “shocking violence” against peaceful dissent.

Last Friday, the state-run SANA news agency reported that the army had “completed” its deployment in and around Jisr al-Shughur and quoted a military official as urging villagers who had fled their homes to return.

The authorities blame “terrorist armed groups” for the unrest that has gripped Syria since pro-democracy protests broke out in mid-March, and say the military deployments are aimed at rooting them out. The army’s sweep through protest centres in the northwest has sent nearly 12,000 Syrians fleeing to safety in neighbouring Turkey, which is scrambling to accommodate the refugees on its Hatay border province with Syria. More than 200 tents have already been erected in the camp, while another 1,000 are due to be ready in a week in the village of Apaydin with a capacity for up to 15,000 people, village headman Omer Cagatay said. Syria’s Red Crescent chief, Abdurrahman Attar, said on Saturday that the refugees would not face retribution or interrogation if they returned home, Turkey’s Anatolia news agency reported.

“We, as the Red Crescent, guarantee that the Syrian government will not call (the refugees) to account and under no circumstances will security forces take decisions about them,” Attar was quoted as saying.