Thousands of Syrians demonstrated after weekly prayers on Friday, activists and witnesses said, keeping up a two-month-old campaign of calls to end autocratic rule, despite a military crackdown that has killed hundreds. With independent journalists barred from the country, it was not possible to assess accurately the numbers taking part nor to compare them to previous weekly rallies against 40 years of Baathist rule by President Bashar al-Assad and his late father.
Initial reports reaching correspondents abroad indicated that a heavy military presence failed to deter many protesters, despite military assaults on some towns which Assad aides said this week had turned the tide against the disparate opposition. There were no immediate reports of violence and bloodshed. Following mounting international diplomatic pressure, the government, which has blamed the unrest on armed Islamists, appeared to have ordered its forces to stand back — one rights campaigner said he had been told by an aide to the president that he ordered troops and police not to fire on demonstrators.
Assad has lifted a 48-year state of emergency in the country but also sent tanks to several cities to suppress the protests. Witnesses said there were protests in Damascus, in a suburb of the capital and the city of Hama where Assad’s father crushed an armed Islamist uprising in 1982. A Kurdish opposition figure said thousands also marched in three towns in eastern Syria. “I am moving among a huge crowd… They are coming from every direction,” said a witness in Hama, 270 km (170 miles) north of Damascus, as demonstrators converged on a city square.
He said security forces backed off from confronting the crowd. It was not possible to put a clear figure on the numbers. In the Damascus district of Barzeh and in the suburb of Saqba witnesses said protesters chanted “We want the overthrow of the regime”, the slogan of the Arab uprisings which toppled leaders in Egypt and Tunisia earlier this year. The main weekly prayers are a rallying point for protesters because they offer the only opportunity for large gatherings. Fridays have seen the heaviest death tolls in the wave of unrest in which rights groups say 600 to 800 people have been killed.
Rights campaigner Louay Hussein said that Assad’s adviser Bouthaina Shaaban told him on Thursday that “definitive presidential orders have been issued not to shoot demonstrators and whoever violates this bears full responsibility”. Shaaban made a similar statement when protests started in March. Authorities have since blamed most of the violence on “armed terrorist groups” backed by Islamists and foreign agitators.
The Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists said troops have killed 700 people, rounded up thousands and indiscriminately shelled towns during the protests. The government says about 100 troops and police have been killed.
