Syrian activists on Thursday launched a campaign of civil disobedience to pile pressure on President Bashar al-Assad, after he drew a stinging rebuke from the US for denying he ordered a deadly crackdown. Local human rights groups said more than 100 people have been killed in Syria since the weekend, and the UN estimates at least 4,000 have died since March when anti-regime protests erupted. But in a rare interview with Western media, President Assad questioned the UN toll and denied ordering the killing of protesters, saying only a “crazy person” would do so.
Washington said Assad’s remarks showed he was disconnected from reality or himself “crazy,” as he comes under mounting global pressure, with Arab nations and Turkey joining the West in pursuing sanctions against his regime.
Despite the rhetoric, the Local Coordination Committees activist network reported on Thursday that Assad’s forces used bombs and “heavy and indiscriminate gunfire” in Damascus and northwestern Idlib province. The LCC, which organises anti-regime protests on the ground in Syria, appealed for citizens to mobilise for a “dignity strike … which will lead to the sudden death of this tyrant regime.”
The campaign would “snowball… and grow each day of the revolution to reach every home and anyone who wants to live delighted and dignified in his/her country,” said an LCC statement received in Nicosia. It urged citizens to begin the action on Sunday — the first day of the working week in Syria — starting with sit-ins at work, and the closure of shops and universities, before the shutdown of transportation networks and a general public sector strike. “The Syrian revolution is… a renaissance against slavery; a scream at the face of humiliation started from the first day as demonstrators cried ‘Syrians are not to be humiliated.’
“The echo of this scream will not vanish till it reaches all ears,” read the statement, adding the strike was “the first step in an overall civil disobedience” campaign which will overthrow the regime. Meanwhile, Syrian security forces on Thursday killed at least seven civilians including a woman in an assault on the restive central city of Homs, activists said. The deaths occurred as the security forces used sniper fire and “arbitrary” shelling during raids on three districts of the city, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Meanwhile, armed “terrorists” have blown up an oil pipeline west of the flashpoint Syrian city of Homs, which transports crude ioil to the (central) city’s refinery from east Syria, the official SANA news agency reported on Thursday. “An armed terrorist group targeted in a sabotage operation the pipeline of Tal al-Shor, west of Homs,” Syria’s third-largest city, SANA said.
It gave no cause for the blast. The explosion is the third reported attack on energy infrastructure since the outbreak of an unprecedented protest movement against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in mid-March.
Moreover, Iraq will hold talks with Syria to implement an Arab League initiative to send observers to monitor the country’s unrest, the group’s chief and Baghdad’s foreign minister said on Thursday. Arab League ministers will meet this weekend to mull a response to Syria which wants the bloc to lift sanctions as its price to allow observers to monitor deadly unrest, an Arab diplomat said Thursday. A taskforce chaired by Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem Al-Thani and comprising the foreign ministers of Algeria, Egypt, Oman and Sudan will gather in Doha with Arab League chief Nabil al-Arabi.
