Syrian army takes over key towns as protests erupt

SYRIAN TROOPS deployed in two northeastern towns yesterday as anti-government protests erupted after noonday prayers in half a dozen cities and towns around the country.

Thousands, reportedly, attended rallies in Homs, Syria’s third city, and Hama, where the military crushed a Muslim Brotherhood rebellion in 1982.

Opposition sources said eight people had been killed in Homs, and 16 throughout the country. Troops took control of the strategic towns of Maarat al-Numan and Khan Shaykun straddling the north-south highway connecting Damascus and Aleppo and stretching to the Turkish border.

The army’s stated objective has been to wrest control from armed radical fundamentalists. Many local people are said to have fled, fearing harsh treatment.

Some of the 10,000 displaced Syrians from the northwest, who have taken refuge in tent encampments on the Turkish side of the border, were set for a visit from Hollywood star and UN envoy Angelina Jolie.

Nato secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen condemned the Syrian regime’s crackdown but said the alliance would not intervene.

He held that there was neither regional support nor a UN mandate for military action. However, the EU has prepared new sanctions against Syrian companies and banks in addition to visa restrictions on and a freeze of assets of senior members of the regime.

Dissidents were unimpressed with the announcement by billionaire businessman Rami Makhlouf that he is to renounce profits from his commercial empire and donate them to charitable projects. Mr Makhlouf, President Bashar al- Assad’s cousin, has been accused of using family connections to enrich himself at the expense of the Syrian people.

Mr Makhlouf, already targeted by US and EU sanctions, controls the country’s main mobile phone firm, an oil concession, an airline company, a hotel, construction companies, duty-free shops and a bank. His worth is estimated at $2 billion (€1.4 billion).

Soon after demonstrations began in mid-March, protesters brandishing signs calling for his prosecution for corruption burned down offices of Syriatel, the mobile phone provider with a 50 per cent market share.

The state news agency reported that he would put up for sale in a public offering his 40 per cent holding in Syriatel and allocate profits to families of those killed during the revolt and other humanitarian causes.

But opponents recall his comments last month to the New York Times when he said the Assad family would fight “to the end” and implied that the country’s stability depended on the regime.

He is not the first member of the family to have his wings clipped. Rifaat al-Assad attempted a coup against his brother, Hafez al-Assad, the current president’s father in 1983 when he was recovering from a heart attack. He was stripped of his posts and exiled.

An unidentified Syrian writing on Syria Comment observed that the regime “is shaken up pretty badly . . . The status quo is unsustainable even if they win . . . The hardliners have lost and the reformers are winning.”

However, the opposition argues that the price has been too high and insists the regime must go.