Army tanks on Saturday 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 them in the event of a further deterioration.
As many as 19 people were killed in protests around the country on Friday, the Local Coordination Committee of anti-government activists said, although it added that it had collected only 12 names so far.
Syrian soldiers in at least six tanks and 15 troop transporters entered the border village of Bdama on Saturday, 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 as the troops entered the village, a few kilometres (miles) 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, contacted by telephone from Nicosia. As Syrians prepared to bury the latest to die at the hands of the security forces, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that the government’s “continued brutality” may delay but will not reverse the process of change.
Rights activists said protests broke out after the main weekly Muslim prayers on Friday as the army pressed its campaign against northern towns and the number of refugees fleeing across the border into Turkey topped 10,000.
Turkey’s Anatolia news agency reported that the refugee figure went up after another 421 Syrians, mostly women and children, arrived at tent cities which the Turkish Red Crescent has erected in the border province of Hatay.
Abdel Rahman said the deadliest incidents on Friday took place 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. The United States is weighing 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.
