Syria army tanks withdrew from Dera’a last Thursday after an eleven-day siege.
Some fifty people were killed during this ordeal, as a result of what activists called indiscriminate shelling.
Tanks continue to surround the city however, thereby sealing it off from the outside world.
On Saturday morning, thirty tanks penetrated within Baniyas, a city located on the Mediterranean coast. An oil refinery is located there, and the town is a major center for the export of Syrian oil.
Residents of Baniyas tried to form human chains to prevent the tanks from advancing inside the city, but to no avail.
The army occupied Sunni districts, but not Alawite neighborhoods.
The Syrian government and its security apparatus are dominated by the Alawite, a Shiite minority sect.
Syrian forces also shot and killed several women on Saturday who were demonstrating against the government outside the city.
Members of the security forces asked them to leave and, when they refused to do so, they opened fire killing three of them and wounding five others who were hospitalized, an activist told Aljazeera.
The city’s electricity was cut, as were all means of communication.
Baniyas is now surrounded from all directions, not a single person can go in or out, a resident told Katherine Marsh, of The Guardian.
Residents are reporting the sound of heavy gunfire and seeing Syrian navy boats off the Baniyas coast. Sunni and mixed neighborhoods are totally besieged now, a human rights activist told Aljazeera.
Basically, we don’t know what’s happening in Baniyas, Wissam Tarif, the director of Insan, a Syrian human rights organization, told Anthony Shadid, of the NYT. Speaking on the phone with a resident of Baniyas, he heard firing, bullets, shooting and screaming, and then we lost contact.
Security forces spread out inside the city, arresting many.
They are conducting search operations in several areas. The army has lists and looking for people based on it, Rami Abdul Rahman, of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told Reuters.
Over two-hundred were arrested, including a ten-year-old boy. It appears to be designed to punish his parents, Mr. Abdul Rahman told AP.
The military occupation of Baniyas came one day after what activists called The Friday of Defiance.
A Syrian opposition Facebook page called The Syrian Revolution 2011 (with over 170,000 members) and which has been very active in mobilizing protesters, called for Syrians to demonstrate after Friday noon prayers.
We will challenge injustice, we will challenge oppression, we will challenge fear, and we will be freed, one comment on the page read.
According to human rights groups, twenty-seven people were killed throughout Syria during these demonstrations.
The Syrian government is unabashedly attempting to crush the uprising by militarily occupying the centers of revolt, resorting to mass arrests (8,000 Syrians have been jailed or are unaccounted for since the demonstrations began mid March), and firing on protesters.
According to the Committee of the Martyrs for the 15 March Revolution, 708 have been killed during the unrest.
The strategy of Assad’s government is obvious: dissuade Syrians from openly challenging his regime by rendering defiance as onerous as possible.
Today, demonstrating in the streets of Syria’s cities is a life-threatening endeavor.
In Homs for instance, the country’s third largest city and one of the centers of the uprising, those wounded during demonstrations are no longer taken to the hospital by their friends or families. I can’t take him to the hospital, Abu Kami, referring to a friend, told Spiegelonline. Anyone who is brought to the hospital will be arrested. Hence, some activists are left to die at home…
Residents cannot even donate blood. But the police had blocked off the hospital, one angry donor told Spiegelonline. They were literally waiting for the wounded so that they could arrest them.
Moreover, even those who die in the hospital are no longer claimed by their families.
The parents of people who were shot to death were forced to go on television and state that their children were radical Islamists (who the regime blames for the unrest). That’s why no one is coming forward anymore, the frustrated donor added.
The Friday of Defiance was particularly bloody in Homs.
We answered the call to protest today. But the intelligence forces attacked us right away by opening fire on us, one activist told the NYT last Friday.
The violence, the arrests, the intimidation, the harassment are clearly taking their toll.
The protests can’t get the momentum to increase the numbers on the ground, as we saw in Egypt and Tunisia. The collective punishment of cities, mass arrests and the tactics of snipers created some fear, Radwan Ziadeh, a Syrian human right activist, currently a scholar at Georges Washington University in Washington, told Anthony Shadid, of the NYT.
Appalled by the violence, the European Union plans to impose travel restrictions and freeze the assets of fourteen Syrian dignitaries. Alas, Assad is not on the list.
The Facebook group Syrian Revolution 2011 challenged Assad to rise to the occasion:
Stop shooting all demonstrators, allow peaceful demonstrations, release all prisoners, allow political pluralism and free elections in six months, it wrote.
Will Assad have the courage to heed this advice?
This is highly unlikely.
If he had, Syria would be a democratic society and he would no longer be in power.
Assad is only interested in Assad and his wealthy and corrupt clan.
He and they must go.
Let us hope that the brave Syrian people will have the necessary resilience to topple the despicable Assad regime which has been preying on the nation for over forty years…
(the photograph of Baniyas residents demonstrating last Thursday is by AP)
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