At least 30 people were killed in the Syrian city of Hama on Wednesday as security forces stormed the flashpoint protest centre, a witness told AFP in Nicosia on the phone. A Hama resident who managed to escape the city said Thursday that “the bodies of 30 people who were killed during shelling by the army have been buried in several public parks.”
The witness, who declined to be identified for security reasons, said scores of people were being treated in hospitals for injuries and that fires broke out in several buildings. “Tanks are deployed throughout the city, particularly in Assi Square and citadel and outside the citadel,” he said about landmarks in the city centre of Hama.
The source charged that “yesterday (Wednesday) the Syrian army used bombs that break up into fragments when they explode,” in a likely reference to cluster bombs. The city echoed with the intermittent sound of machine gun fire on Thursday morning, after intense shelling the previous day, the witness said, adding “snipers were positioned on the roofs of private hospitals.”
“Conditions are very difficult in the city. Communications, electricity and water are cut and there are food shortages,” he added. Meanwhile, Syria’s embattled president on Thursday decreed a law allowing opposition political parties, state media said after the UN Security Council condemned his regime’s deadly crackdown on democracy protests.
President Bashar al-Assad authorised the “Parties Law, which was earlier adopted as a draft law by the government following a series of thorough discussions by lawmakers, intellectuals and Syrian citizens,” said state news agency SANA. The new law allows political parties to be set up alongside Assad’s Baath party, in power since 1963 with the constitutional status of “the leader of state and society.” Political pluralism has been at the forefront of demands by pro-reform dissidents who since March 15 have been taking to the streets across Syria almost daily to call for greater freedoms. Assad’s regime has used brutal force to crush the movement, killing more than 1,600 civilians and arresting thousands, according to human rights activists.
