Hundreds of tanks and troop carriers were deployed on Wednesday near the Syrian protest hubs of Deir Ezzor and Hama, activists said, as the UN Security Council was to meet for a third day on the Syria crisis. The 15-member Security Council has been struggling since Monday over how to respond to a crisis that Russia warns is veering toward civil war, amid growing pressure on the United States to take a tougher line.
“There are some 100 tanks and troop carriers on the highway leading to the central town of Hama and about 200 tanks around the eastern town of Deir Ezzor,” Rami Abdel Rahman, of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said. He told AFP that all telephone and Internet communication had been cut in Hama and nearby areas.
Abdel Rahman added that two people were killed late Tuesday when security forces opened fire on demonstrators in the northern town of Raqqa and a third was killed during a protest in the coastal town of Jableh. In Hama, tanks were deployed in several districts and shelling could be heard across several neighbourhoods, another activist told AFP. “From the sound of the shelling, it sounds like it’s open warfare,” the activist said. The Local Coordination Committees, which represents the protesters, said that tanks had moved deep into Hama which was undergoing heavy shelling while plumes of smoke could be seen over the city of 800,000 residents.
“People are deserting the city and are faced by live gunfire from security forces and army troops if they don’t respond to orders to go back inside,” the Coordination Committees said in a statement.
It reported security checkpoints in and around Hama and said a building and several homes collapsed due to the shelling. The Coordination Committees also reported that a nine-year-old boy was killed on Tuesday in the coastal city of Latakia when shots were fired at his house. The accounts could not be independently verified as foreign reporters are not allowed to travel in Syria to report on the unrest. The fierce crackdown on Hama — where an estimated 20,000 people were killed in 1982 when the government crushed an Islamist uprising — has prompted solidarity protests across Syria over the past two days.
Divisions, meanwhile, remained among the 15 members of the Security Council on the wording of any condemnation of President Bashar al-Assad’s crackdown on protests and whether it should be a formal resolution or a less weighty statement.
