Syrian forces seal off Latakia
BEIRUT — Syria’s military closed off access to the Mediterranean port of Latakia by land and sea and stormed the suburbs of the city of Homs in an effort to prevent further anti-government protests, activists said Tuesday.
Latakia, which was overtaken by soldiers backed by artillery and warships this week, was subjected to a fourth day of tank fire today as Sunni Muslim areas were targeted and troops restricted movement in and out of the city, Mahmoud Merhi, head of the Arab Organization for Human Rights, said by phone from Damascus, the capital. The government said any naval action was a “routine exercise” and not an attack.
At least 33 people have been killed by security forces in Latakia in the past three days, while the crackdown also left 15 protesters dead Monday in Homs along with one in the eastern town of Deir al-Zour and another in the northern province of Idlib, Merhi said. The severing of communication links with Latakia has made it difficult to learn whether the toll has risen, he said. Protesters also returned to the streets of Damascus and Daraa.
More than 2,400 people have been killed since the uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government began in March, according to Merhi and Ammar Qurabi of the National Organization for Human Rights in Syria. The United Nations put the toll at about 2,000. The State Department estimated that the government has detained more than 30,000 people. Protests began after demonstrations toppled the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt, and destabilized Libya.
Syria’s military denied that a naval attack was waged by its vessels and that they were “carrying out their routine exercises for protecting the coast and preventing smuggling of weapons into the country by sea,” the state-run SANA agency reported.
International pressure on the government is increasing, with President Barack Obama, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah and British Prime Minister David Cameron calling on Syria to stop attacking its people. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Aug. 12 urged nations doing business with Syria to cut off trade and arms sales. Canada is extending sanctions on Assad’s regime.
The foreign minister of neighboring Turkey, Ahmet Davutoglu, said Monday that the “time for words will be over” unless Syria ends military operations against its people.
The United Nations agency that helps Palestinian refugees said a number of Palestinians were killed as the security forces fired at a refugee camp in Latakia. The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees called upon the authorities to exercise the “utmost restraint in accordance with international law,” according to a statement on its website.
The European Union should freeze the assets of the Syrian National Oil Co., the Syrian National Gas Co. and the Central Bank of Syria until the government “ends gross human-rights abuses against its citizens,” the New York-based Human Rights Watch said Tuesday in an emailed statement.
“The aim is to harm the government’s ability to fund its repression and not to hurt the Syrian people who are courageously demanding their basic rights,” Lotte Leicht, EU director for the group, said in the statement.
Under Syrian law, the government is the major shareholder in the oil and gas industry through ownership of the two energy companies, which have a 50 percent share in every oil and gas project in the country. Syria, whose production is declining, produces about 385,000 barrels of crude a day and has the Middle East’s ninth-largest reserves, according to data from BP.
Assad, who succeeded his father, Hafez, as president after his death in 2000, has blamed the protests on foreign-inspired plots. More than 500 members of the security forces have died since the unrest began, the government has said.
Many of Assad’s top officials are from the Alawite branch of Islam, an offshoot of Shiism, while most of Syria’s population is Sunni Muslim.
Spain sent a secret mission to Syria in July in an attempt to help end the violence and is prepared to offer asylum to Assad and his family, the Spanish newspaper El Pais reported Monday, citing unidentified diplomats. Spain has made no such offer yet nor has it been asked to do so, the newspaper said.
Rifaat al-Assad, who was exiled by his brother during Hafez al-Assad’s presidency in the 1980s, lived in southern Spain and now resides in London with his family.