The New York Times


May 12, 2011
Signs of Chaos in Syria’s Intense Crackdown
By ANTHONY SHADID

¶ BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syrian forces carried out raids in towns on the outskirts of Damascus and a besieged city on the coast on Thursday, as the number of detainees surged in a government campaign so sweeping that human rights groups said many neighborhoods were subjected to repeated raids and some people detained multiple times by competing security agencies.

¶ The ferocious crackdown on the uprising, which began in March, has recently escalated, as the government braces for the possibility of another round of protests on Friday, a day that has emerged as the weekly climax in a broad challenge to the 11-year rule of President Bashar al-Assad.

¶ Residents have reported that hundreds of detainees are being held in soccer stadiums, schools and government buildings in various towns and cities across the country, some of them arrested in door-to-door raids by black-clad forces carrying lists of activists.

¶ Others have said the arrests are often arbitrary, sometimes for little more than a tattered identity card, in a campaign that seems motivated to bully people to stay indoors and to restore a measure of the fear that has buttressed the Assad family’s four decades of rule. Many men have been forced to sign a pledge not to protest again, residents said.

¶ “The reaction of the authorities has excluded any possibility of having a rational solution,” said Rassem al-Atassi, the president of the Arab Association for Human Rights in Syria, in Homs, the country’s third largest-city and a center of the uprising.

¶ Mr. Atassi himself was released last week after being detained for 10 days.

¶ “I only see this crisis becoming worse,” he said. “There’s no political solution.”

¶ The brutality of the repression has led the United States and the European Union to impose some sanctions on figures in the leadership, though not on Mr. Assad himself. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton moved the United States a step closer to calling for the ouster of Mr. Assad on Thursday as she denounced the crackdown.

¶ “The recent events in Syria make clear that the country cannot return to the way it was before,” Mrs. Clinton said before a meeting in Greenland among Arctic nations. “Tanks and bullets and clubs will not solve Syria’s political and economic challenges.”

¶ The Obama administration has criticized the Syrian government repeatedly and imposed some sanctions on several senior security officials, but it has not yet pursued aggressive diplomatic measures, including action at the United Nations Security Council.

¶ Mrs. Clinton said that the United States would now pursue “additional steps to hold Syria responsible for its gross human rights abuses.”

¶ “There may be some who think this is a sign of strength,” she said, “but treating one’s own people in this way is in fact a sign of remarkable weakness.”

¶ A senior official elaborated that sanctions were being considered on additional Syrian officials. That could include Mr. Assad himself.

¶ Bouthaina Shaaban, an adviser to Mr. Assad, said this week that Syrian officials thought that the American condemnations so far were “not too bad.”

¶ In the meantime, its military has besieged Dara’a, the southern town where the uprising began with protests over the arrests of youths, as well as Baniyas and Homs.

¶ The detentions have piled up so rapidly that assembling a tally has become guesswork. Syria’s National Organization for Human Rights put the number at 9,000. Wissam Tarif, the executive director of Insan, a human rights group, said his organization had recorded 8,000 people arrested as of May 3. In the past week, he said, they had recorded 2,800 more — though, as with the National Organization, he said he suspected that the number was much higher.

¶ “The numbers are in the thousands,” said Khalil Maatouk, a Damascus lawyer who works with prisoners and detainees. “Those who were released told me that the jails are packed, and they’re using stadiums and government buildings to keep them all.”

¶ The Syrian government has acknowledged the crackdown, calling it a response to an armed uprising of militant Islamists, saboteurs and even ex-convicts. American officials have acknowledged that some protesters are armed, though they are a distinct minority, and reports from refugees fleeing across the Syria-Lebanon border suggest that armed clashes between security forces and their opponents have erupted this week in Homs.

¶ Amnesty International, based in London, said it had firsthand reports of torture and beatings of protesters detained by security forces. Ammar Qurabi, president of the National Organization for Human Rights, said people who took part in the rallies were detained, while those identified as leaders or as having chanted slogans against the government were tortured.

¶ Indeed, human rights groups said the abuse might be part of the government’s aim: many detainees are released after a few days so that they can share their experiences, spreading fear among those who might be willing to join the demonstrations.

¶ The groups sketched a portrait of free-wheeling campaigns that sometimes seemed methodical and that other times showed little organization. Mr. Tarif said that in Baniyas, an oil industry town on the coast, security forces carried out a wave of arrests, collected information and then returned a few days later for another wave of arrests.

¶ Other times, he said, young men were arrested, released and then picked up by a competing security branch, which still had their names on circulating lists. Some had even already signed a pledge, admittedly under duress, not to protest again. “The local branches aren’t even coordinating,” Mr. Tarif said.

¶ The crackdown has played out along a crescent from the Mediterranean coast through Homs to drought-stricken regions of southern Syria. On Thursday, most arrests were reported in Baniyas and the nearby town of Bayda, along with the towns on the outskirts of Damascus where protests have proved to be especially resilient. Many residents described a pattern in which the military entered first, followed by the security forces and then armed men in plain clothes, known as shabeeha.

¶ The Syrian military said it had ended its operations in Homs, and residents reported that 10 tanks had withdrawn from the hardest-hit neighborhood, Bab Amr. After a day of shelling and gunfire, and sporadic shots heard before dawn, the area was relatively quiet on Thursday, a resident there, Abu Haydar, said by phone. “Most of the people have left Bab Amr,” he said. “It’s too dangerous.”

¶ Residents fleeing Homs for the Lebanese border said some had taken up arms against the security forces in Bab Amr.

¶ “Men are not sleeping at home,” said Umm Amina, a 53-year-old woman who left the Homs region on Wednesday. “They all sleep outside on the street and keep their rifles next to them to protect their women and their houses from the shabeeha.”

¶ The government has sought to forcefully keep campuses silent in Damascus and Syria’s second-largest city, Aleppo, which has been relatively quiet so far. But while students in Aleppo said that dozens of their associates had been arrested in past weeks, hundreds of people were reported to have protested Wednesday night at the university there.

¶ “We couldn’t just watch news of the daily killing in Homs, Baniyas and Dara’a,” said a law student who gave his name as Maher. “We are university students from all of Syria’s provinces, and we want to express our sympathy with our people.”

¶ Reporting was contributed by Hwaida Saad and an employee of The New York Times from Beirut; an employee of The Times from Damascus, Syria; and Steven Lee Myers from Nuuk, Greenland.