Syrian security forces fire on rallies, killing 30 (AP)

By ELIZABETH A. KENNEDY, Associated Press Elizabeth A. Kennedy, Associated Press – 12?mins?ago

BEIRUT – Syrian security forces opened fire Friday on protesters and hunted them down in house-to-house raids, killing about 30 people in the deadliest day in weeks in the country's 7-month-old uprising, activists said.

The popular revolt against Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime has proved remarkably resilient, with protests erupting every week despite the near-certainty the government will respond with bullets and tear gas. The U.N. estimates the regime crackdown on the protests has killed 3,000 people since March.

Much of the bloodshed Friday happened after the protests had ended and security forces armed with machine guns chased protesters and activists, according to opposition groups monitoring the demonstrations. Authorities disrupted telephone and Internet service, they said.

The Syrian opposition's two main activist groups, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Local Coordinating Committees, gave figures for the protesters killed on Friday ranging from 29 to 37.

The flashpoints were Homs and Hama in central Syria, where opposition to the regime is strong. Hama is the site of a massacre nearly 30 years ago which has come to symbolize the ruthlessness of the Assad dynasty.

Rami Abdul-Rahman, the head of the observatory, said security forces in Homs were firing machine guns as they conducted raids in search of protesters and activists. In Hama, there were heavy clashes between the army and gunmen believed to be army defectors.

Syria has largely sealed off the country from foreign journalists and prevented independent reporting, making it difficult to confirm events on the ground. Key sources of information are amateur videos posted online, witness accounts and details gathered by activist groups.

Communications were spotty Friday in the Damascus suburb of Douma and in Homs. The move appeared to be an attempt to cut off the opposition's ability to organize and report on the protests.

"There was a very fierce reaction to the protests in Homs today," said Syria-based activist Mustafa Osso. Syrian forces opened fire as some 2,000 people gathered for protests, he said.

"There are many injured as well. Hospitals are having a hard time coping with the casualties," Osso told The Associated Press.

Majd Amer, an activist in Homs said sporadic gunfire could be heard as protesters poured out of mosques following Friday prayers.

It is difficult to gauge the strength of the revolt in Syria, a country of 22 million people. The crackdown does not appear to have significantly reduced the number of protests, but neither does the regime appear to be in any imminent danger of collapse.

The regime appears to lack sufficient numbers of loyal troops to garrison all the centers of unrest at the same time, so government forces will often sweep through an area in the wake of protests, breaking up new gatherings and hunting activists, before being deployed elsewhere.

The result has been a monthslong stalemate. Still, the capture and subsequent death of Libya's Moammar Gadhafi, under still-unclear circumstances, has energized the opposition. Last week, thousands of Syrians took to the streets shouting that Assad will be next.

The protests come amid efforts by the Arab League to end the bloodshed, and debates within the opposition on how to bring international pressure to bear on the regime.

On Friday, many protesters said they wanted a no-fly zone established over Syria to protect civilians in case the Syrian regime considers attacking protesters from the sky, the activist groups said.

The protesters also called for international monitors, although most opposition groups reject the idea of foreign military intervention.

The Syrian government insists the unrest is being driven by terrorists and foreign extremists looking to stir up sectarian strife.

View the original article here

Syrian troops fire on protesters, killing 10 (AP)

BEIRUT – Security forces opened fire on protesters, killing at least 10, as tens of thousands poured into streets across Syria on Friday, chanting for the fall of President Bashar Assad and defying a fierce military siege of Hama, where tanks shelled residential districts around dawn.

The six-day-old assault on Hama, which has killed at least 100 people, seemed to do little to intimidate protesters, though the marches were smaller than previous Fridays, perhaps in part because this was the first Friday of the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset.

Protests spread from the capital, Damascus, to the southern province of Daraa and to Deir al-Zour in the east. Other demonstrations were reported in Homs in the center and in Qamishli, near the Turkish border.

"Hama, we are with you until death," a crowd marching through Damascus' central neighborhood of Midan shouted, clapping their hands as they chanted, "We don't want you Bashar" and "Bashar Leave," according to amateur videos from Friday posted on line by activists.

In another district of the capital, Qadam, protesters carried a banner reading, "Bashar is slaughtering the people and the international community is silent."

Security forces opened fire with live ammunition and tear gas in several cities, activists said. At least seven people were killed in the Damascus suburb of Arbeen, according to the London-based Observatory for Human Rights and the Local Coordination Committees, a group that tracks protests. They said one person was killed in the suburb of Moaddamiya and two in the central city of Homs.

State-run TV said reported that two policemen were killed and 8 wounded when they were ambushed in the northern town of Maarat al-Numan

Activists also said three people were wounded in Homs.

In Hama, government tanks shelled residential districts in Hama around 4 a.m., just as people were beginning their daily fast, one resident told The Associated Press.

The evening before, the shelling hit around sunset, while residents were having their meal breaking the fast, the resident said, asking for anonymity for fear of government reprisals.

"If people get wounded, it is almost impossible to take them to hospital," the resident said by telephone.

On previous Fridays — the day of the biggest protests — Hama has seen massive marches by hundreds of thousands that were the largest in Syria. But under the siege, with electricity, internet and phone services cut off and food supplies running short, there were no immediate reports of protests in the city during the day Friday.

Hama, a city of 800,000 with a history of dissent, had fallen largely out of government control since June as residents turned on the regime and blockaded the streets against encroaching tanks. But Syrian security forces backed by tanks and snipers launched a ferocious military offensive that left corpses in streets Sunday and sent residents fleeing for their lives, according to residents.

State-run Syrian TV on Friday showed footage from inside Hama, with images of streets blocked by makeshift barricades set up by protesters. It showed a tank removing a large cement barrier as well as a bus that had its windshield shattered.

The report also showed a yellow taxi car with a dead man in the driver's seat and bloodstains on the door. A picture carried by state-run news agency SANA showed empty streets with debris and damaged cars.

SANA said the Syrian army is restoring "security and stability" to Hama after it was "taken over by terrorists."

Hama has seen government crackdowns before. In 1982, Assad's father, Hafez Assad, ordered the military to quell a rebellion by Syrian members of the conservative Muslim Brotherhood movement there. Hama was sealed off and bombs dropped from above smashed swaths of the city and killed between 10,000 and 25,000 people, rights groups say.

Although there has been a near-total communications blackout in Hama, witnesses have painted a grim picture of life in the city. "People are being slaughtered like sheep while walking in the street," a resident said Thursday, speaking by phone on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. "I saw with my own eyes one young boy on a motorcycle who was carrying vegetables being run over by a tank." He said he left Hama briefly through side roads to smuggle in food supplies.

The uprising began in mid-March, inspired by the revolutions sweeping the Arab world. Friday has become the main day for protests in Syria, despite the near-certainty that tanks and snipers will respond with deadly force.

More than 1,700 civilians have been killed in the regime crackdown on the uprising since March.

Assad has largely brushed off international pressure on his regime.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said Thursday he has warned Syria's leader that he will face a "sad fate" if he fails to introduce reforms in his country and open a peaceful dialogue with the opposition.

In the United States, the Obama administration moved to further isolate Assad and his inner circle imposing sanctions on a prominent pro-regime businessman and his firm.

Thursday's sanctions against Assad family confidante Muhammad Hamsho and his firm, Hamsho International Group, freeze any assets they may have in U.S. jurisdictions and bar Americans from doing business with them. Hamsho's holding company has about 20 subsidiaries ranging from construction, civil engineering, telecommunications and hotels to carpet sales, horse trading and ice cream production.

____

Bassem Mroue can be reached http://twitter.com/bmroue

View the original article here

Mystery surrounds killing of Libyan rebel army head (Reuters)

BENGHAZI, Libya (Reuters) – Libya's rebel military commander was shot dead in an incident shrouded in mystery, dealing a blow to the Western-backed forces struggling to topple Muammar Gaddafi.

Rebels said Abdel Fattah Younes, long a member of the veteran leader's inner circle before defecting in February, was shot by assailants on Thursday after he had been summoned from the battlefield for unspecified talks with other rebel leaders.

The killing of such a senior figure is an embarrassment and a setback for the rebels regardless of who was responsible -- Gaddafi agents apparently able to strike deep in rebel inner circles, or his own side. There are known to be stark divisions between Gaddafi defectors and those who never worked with him.

The rebels did not say who killed Younes or where. His death coincided with a new rebel offensive in the west and further international recognition for rebels, which they hope will help unfreeze billions of dollars in Libyan state funds.

On Friday, weeping relatives and supporters brought his coffin into the main square of the rebel stronghold of Benghazi to mourn him.

"We got the body yesterday here (in Benghazi), he had been shot with bullets and burned," Younes's nephew, Abdul Hakim, said, crying as he followed the coffin through the square.

"He had called us at 10 o'clock (on Thursday morning) to say he was on his way here."

RUMOURS OF SECRET TALKS

Officials would not give details of why Younes had been recalled to Benghazi from the front line near the oil port of Brega for questioning. Rumors had circulated in Benghazi that he had held secret talks with the Gaddafi government.

"If the Rumors that General Younes was feeding information to Gaddafi were there then it would make sense that some rogue elements might attempt to assassinate him," said Alan Fraser, an analyst with London-based risk consultancy AKE.

Rebel defense minister Omar Hariri told Reuters his death was still being investigated and the loss would be great.

In Benghazi relatives vowed allegiance to the rebels' political leader.

"A message to Mustafa Abdel Jalil: We will walk with you all the way," nephew Mohammed Younes told hundreds of mourners in the main square.

But at the funeral later, worried mourners expressed fears he may have died at the hands of other rebels.

Seraj, a soldier who described himself as a relative, said he had heard that Younes and two other army officials killed with him had gone without a fight with men who had summoned them to Benghazi. "Later we heard that he was killed," he said.

Nephew Hakim said another coffin brought into the square by a crowd of men, some in military fatigues and some with rifles, held the body of one of the other men killed with Younes.

"It seems this was an assassination operation organized by Gaddafi's men," said London-based Libyan activist Shamis Ashour. "There certainly was treason, a sleeping cell among the rebels."

"The alternative, which is equally possible," said another analyst, Shashank Joshi, "is summary execution by rebels, an internal act of decapitation by the rebels themselves."

Joshi, of London's Royal United Services Institute, said this explanation would highlight divisions in rebel ranks already known to exist, and put a question mark over the rebels' reliability as partners for Western states.

"All these things would humiliate governments that have supported the rebels. Particularly Britain, which came late to the fray, partly for reasons like this," he said.

One rebel commander said Islamists may have been to blame.

Libyan state TV named a rebel it said had killed Younes.

Younes, from eastern Libya where the rebels are strongest, was Gaddafi's interior minister but swapped sides to become the military chief in the rebel Transitional National Council, whose political leader Jalil announced his death.

Jalil said the killers were still at large but added:

"The head of the armed cell, to which the accusing finger points and a member of which carried out this individual cowardly crime, has been arrested." He gave no details.

Younes, who was involved in the 1969 coup that brought Gaddafi to power, was not trusted by all rebel leaders due to his previous role in cracking down on dissidents.

CAMPAIGN BLOW

His death is likely to be a severe setback to a movement that has won the backing of some 30 nations -- most recently Britain and Portugal -- but is laboring on the battlefield.

Hariri, the rebel defense minister, visited the front line in western Libya on Friday. At a nearby checkpoint he told Reuters Younes's death was still being investigated.

"Of course this will have an impact on the rebels, after all we have lost a key leader," he said. "But they will recover, and there will be other leaders."

Analyst David Hartwell of IHS in London said:

"He was one of the few credible senior opposition military commanders and he has been a key figure in helping stabilize and re-organize rebel fighters."

Fighters on the front line near the town of Misrata said they viewed Younes as a martyr and would avenge his death.

"It will be an extra motive for us in the fight against the tyrant," said Khaled al-Uwayyib.

Rebels took swathes of Libya early on after rising up in February to end Gaddafi's 41 years of domination of the oil-producing North African state but have made few recent advances despite the support of NATO air strikes.

They said they had seized several towns in the Western Mountains on Thursday but are yet to make a major breakthrough.

A rebel commander near Ghezaia told Reuters on Friday that around 100 insurgents had taken control of the town, from which Gaddafi forces had dominated plains below the mountains.

Reuters could not go there to confirm the report as rebels said the area could be mined. But looking through binoculars from a rebel-held ridge near Nalut, reporters could see no sign of Gaddafi's forces in Ghezaia.

Another rebel commander said the settlements of Takut and Um al Far had also been seized.

With prospects fading for a negotiated settlement, the five-month-old civil war will grind on into the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in August.

Nick Witney, analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Paris, said the West had hoped for a "nice simple conflict" with right prevailing, but this had ignored Libya's nuanced tribal-based politics.

"It was a brave and right thing to do," he said. "But I feel we've lost the moral high ground a bit and wandered into something that will be prolonged and messy, but we're not in a position to sort out."

(Additional reporting by Michael Georgy near Ghezaia; Mussab Al-Khairalla in Misrata; Alexandria Sage in Paris; Samia Nakhoul, Avril Ormsby and Clare Kane in London and Missy Ryan in Tripoli; writing by Richard Meares; editing by Andrew Roche)

View the original article here

Sectarian killing spree kills 30 in Syria (AP)

BEIRUT – The discovery of three corpses with their eyes gouged out set off a sectarian killing spree that left 30 people dead in a chilling sign that the Syrian revolt against President Bashar Assad is enflaming long-simmering religious tensions.

The opposition accused the president's minority Alawite regime of trying to stir up trouble among the Sunni majority to blunt the growing enthusiasm for the four-month-old uprising. The protesters have been careful to portray their movement as free of any sectarian overtones.

The killings over the weekend in the central city of Homs "undermine the peaceful nature of the revolution and serve its enemies who want to turn it into a civil war," said Rami Abdul-Rahman, the director of the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Homs-based activist Mohammad Saleh said the violence began Saturday after the corpses of three Alawite government supporters were dumped in Homs with their eyes gouged.

The men had gone missing two days earlier.

On Sunday, six bodies from various sects were found in the city, apparently in revenge attacks, Saleh said. Pro-government Alawite thugs called shabiha then went on a rampage, another activist said, opening fire in predominantly Sunni neighborhoods of Homs.

The dead included a 27-year-old mother of three, who was shot as she left her home, and a man in his 50s who was struck by a bullet on his balcony, a resident said.

"I was at the man's funeral yesterday, all he did was go out on his balcony," he said, adding that civilians have started setting up roadblocks to protect their neighborhoods. He spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

Up to 40 shops were vandalized or burned, he said.

"It was a catastrophe, the situation could easily have slipped out of control," the resident said, adding the situation calmed down Monday but tensions were high.

Sectarian warfare is among the most dire scenarios facing Syria.

The country is home to more than 1 million refugees from neighboring Iraq, who serve as a clear testament to the dangers of regime collapse and fracture in a religiously divided society. They also see the seemingly intractable sectarian tensions in Lebanon as a cautionary tale.

"The Assad regime itself has a vested interest to portray the protest movement as one which is violent led by criminals, terrorists and by external actors," said Anthony Skinner, associate director at Maplecroft, a British-based risk analysis company.

"This is potentially an issue that Assad can manipulate to try and divide the momentum that we have seen building up," he said.

The Assad regime has long held together a fragile jigsaw puzzle of Middle Eastern backgrounds — Sunnis, Shiites, Alawites, Christians, Kurds, Druse, Circassians, Armenians and more.

An offshoot of Shiite Islam, the Alawite sect represents about 11 percent of the population in Syria. The sect's longtime dominance has bred seething resentments, which Assad has worked to tamp down by enforcing a strictly secular identity in Syria.

But now, Assad is relying heavily on his Alawite power base to crush the uprising, particularly amid rumors that Sunni army conscripts have been refusing to fire on civilians.

He has tried to dampen enthusiasm for the revolt by blaming the unrest on "armed gangs" and a foreign plot to sow sectarian strife.

Minority groups have been receptive to Assad's argument that only his regime can guarantee law and order, in part because they fear being marginalized if the Sunni majority takes over.

In part due to the shabiha's role in the crackdown, Syria's sectarian tensions have been laid bare for the first time in decades — a taboo subject because of the Assad family's 40-year dynasty of minority rule. Assad's father and predecessor crushed a Sunni uprising in 1982, shelling the town of Hama and killing tens of thousands in a massacre that is seared into the minds of Syrians.

On Monday, the Interior Ministry said it will deal firmly with "terrorist groups" and armed gunmen who are carrying out terrorist acts and torching private and public property.

Human rights group say more than 1,600 people, most of them unarmed civilians, have been killed in Assad's crackdown on a largely peaceful protest movement. The government disputes that toll and blames the unrest on gunmen and religious extremists looking to stir up sectarian strife.

Some 350 soldiers and policemen also are believed to have died in the unrest.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and Saleh, the Homs activist, put the death toll in Homs at 30 and said they have the names of the victims.

But another activist in Homs said he's not certain if the death toll was as high as 30 and said the number could be lower.

Also Monday, Syria's pro-government Al-Watan newspaper said that the Qatari embassy in Damascus has suspended operations because of recent protests outside the embassy against Al-Jazeera's coverage of the Syrian uprising. Al-Jazeera is based in Qatar.

Syria accuses Al-Jazeera and other media of incitement and fabricating events in their coverage of the protests.

___

Zeina Karam can be reached on http://twitter.com/zkaram

View the original article here

Hezbollah member wanted in Lebanon ex-PM killing (AP)

By BASSEM MROUE and ELIZABETH A. KENNEDY, Associated Press Bassem Mroue And Elizabeth A. Kennedy, Associated Press – 3?mins?ago

BEIRUT – A U.N.-backed court indicted at least one senior Hezbollah member and three other suspects Thursday in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, a killing that transformed this tiny Arab nation and brought down its government earlier this year.

The implication of Iranian-backed Shiite Hezbollah — the dominant player in Lebanon's new government — threatens to plunge this tiny Arab nation on Israel's northern border into a new and violent crisis by opening up sectarian tensions between Sunnis and Shiites.

An international tribunal issued the indictments and arrest warrants Thursday without releasing the names of the accused. But a Lebanese judicial official who saw the warrants read the names to The Associated Press, requesting anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

One of the people named is Mustafa Badreddine, believed to have been Hezbollah's deputy military commander. He is the brother-in-law of the late Hezbollah military commander Imad Mughniyeh and is suspected of involvement in the 1983 bombings of the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait that killed five people.

The other suspects are: Salim Ayyash, also known as Abu Salim; Assad Sabra and Hassan Anise, who changed his name to Hassan Issa.

Abraham Bryan, an expert on Hezbollah affairs who writes for the leading An-Nahar newspaper, said Badreddine is the only well-known suspect named in the indictment.

"Hezbollah surrounds its military leadership with secrecy," he said. "Nobody knows the three others. ... Are they alive or not? Are these their real names or no?"

The U.N.-backed Hariri tribunal had long been expected to accuse members of Hezbollah — something the Iranian-backed militant group has insisted it will not accept. Lebanon recently formed a new government that gives Hezbollah unprecedented political power.

There have been lingering fears that tensions over the tribunal could lead to street protests and a new crisis in a country where stability has long been shaky.

Lebanon has a dark history of sectarian conflict and potentially explosive mix of faiths, including Christian, Sunni and Shiite. Each makes up about a third of Lebanon's population of 4 million.

Rafik Hariri was one of Lebanon's most prominent Sunni leaders and Sunni supporters have demanded that his killers be held accountable.

Last year, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said the group "will cut off the hand" of anyone who tries to arrest any of its members. It was a potent threat, given that Nasrallah commands an arsenal that far outweighs that of the national army.

Hezbollah had no immediate comment.

The long-awaited indictment was welcomed by the office of Hariri's son, Saad, six years after the massive truck bombing along Beirut's waterfront on Feb. 14, 2005 that killed Rafik Hariri.

Hariri, 60 years old at the time, was among 23 people killed in the blast.

"The Lebanese government should commit to full cooperation with the international court, and not run away from detaining the suspects and hand them over to justice which is the guarantee to democracy and stability," Saad Hariri's office said.

Saad Hariri also served as Lebanon's prime minister. But he was forced from office in January, when Hezbollah and its allies toppled his government in a conflict over the tribunal. Hezbollah, which is also backed by Syria, fiercely denies any role in the killing and says the tribunal is a conspiracy by Israel and the United States.

The dispute over the court encapsulates Lebanon's most explosive conflicts: the role of Hezbollah, the country's most powerful political and military force; the country's dark history of sectarian divisions and violence; and Lebanon's fraught relationship with neighboring Syria.

The indictment raises concerns of a possible resurgence of violence that has bedeviled this tiny Arab country of 4 million people for years, including a devastating 1975-1990 civil war and sectarian battles between Sunnis and Shiites in 2008.

Reverberations from the death of Rafik Hariri, a billionaire businessman, are still being felt today.

In January, the investigation triggered a political crisis that brought down the Western-backed government of Saad Hariri, who had been prime minister since 2009. Saad Hariri had refused Hezbollah's demands to renounce the court, prompting 11 Hezbollah ministers and their allies to resign from his unity government.

The move further polarized the country's rival factions: Hezbollah with its patrons in Syria and Iran on one side, and Hariri's Western-backed bloc on the other, with support by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.

The U.S. called Hezbollah's walkout a transparent effort to subvert justice.

After Rafik Hariri was assassinated, suspicion immediately fell on Syria because Hariri had been seeking to weaken its domination of the country.

Syria has denied having any role in the murder, but the killing galvanized opposition to Damascus and led to huge street demonstrations that helped end Syria's 29-year military presence.

The tribunal, which is jointly funded by U.N. member states and Lebanon, filed a draft indictment in January but the contents were not revealed as Belgian judge Daniel Fransen decided whether there was enough evidence for a trial. The draft has been amended twice since then.

In the meantime, Lebanon formed a new government this month — after five months of political wrangling — that gives Hezbollah unprecedented political domination. But Prime Minister Najib Mikati, who was Hezbollah's pick for the post, has insisted he will not do one side's bidding.

On Thursday, Mikati gave a news conference in which he tried to calm tensions while also navigating between the rival political factions.

"Lebanon's interests should be above all things," he said, adding that there was no final word yet on who killed the former prime minister.

"The indictments are not verdicts," Mikati said.

Saad Hariri has refused to take part in the government and is now a member of the opposition.

Lebanese authorities now have 30 days to serve the indictments on suspects or execute arrest warrants. If they fail, the court can then order the indictment published and advertised in local media.

View the original article here