The breadth of the assault — from the Mediterranean coast to the poor steppe of southern Syria — seemed to represent an important turn in an uprising that has posed the gravest challenge to the 11-year-long rule of President Bashar al-Assad. Though officials have continued to hint at reforms, and even gingerly reached out to some dissidents last week, the escalation of the crackdown seemed to signal the government’s intent to end the uprising by force.
Since the beginning of the uprising, Syria has barred most foreign journalists, and many news accounts have relied on human rights groups and networks of activists inside Syria. But in past days, those activists have complained that they have been almost entirely unable to speak with people in Homs and Baniyas, the most besieged places. Even satellite phones that protest organizers had smuggled across Syria were not working. “It seems that they’ve gotten better in tracking satellite mobile phones,” said Wissam Tarif, executive director of Insan, a Syrian human rights group.
The reasons for the newfound ability to sever communications were unclear, but Obama administration officials have said Iran, which faced a similar uprising in 2009, has provided the Syrian government, a longtime ally, with coercive supplies like tear gas, along with communications equipment that might help interrupt activists’ phones.
“The only country they can trust to back them to the end is Iran,” said an analyst based in Syria who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
The Syrian government’s actions against protesters, which have intensified since Friday, come at a time when the opposition remains unable to act collectively. Even as the United States and the European Union have imposed limited sanctions on government figures, though not Mr. Assad himself, many officials view the opposition as too weak to provide an alternative, a point that the Syrian government has relentlessly pressed. Its argument, either us or chaos, has found a certain resonance among minorities of Christians and heterodox Muslim sects there.
“We’re not focused on a transition right now,” an Obama administration official said in Washington. “We don’t know who we’d talk to and who we’d work with.”
At least 30 tanks were said to be in Baniyas, one of Syria’s most restive locales, which the military entered before dawn on Saturday. Activists and human rights groups complained of receiving almost no information from Baniyas, which has a population of 50,000 and is home to an oil refinery and a hydroelectric plant that serves the region, but one activist said at least 6 people had been killed and 250 people arrested since the operation began.
As in other towns, electricity and water were cut, at least temporarily.
Fighting was reported in Homs, Syria’s third largest city, which tanks entered Friday. Mr. Tarif said 14 people had been killed there; he could not confirm the casualties in Baniyas. Videos smuggled out of Homs, their authenticity undetermined, showed gunfire and crowds of people running for cover across a grassy lot. Mr. Tarif said the military also entered Tafas, in southern Syria.
“This is a campaign that’s going to more cities,” he said. “It’s escalating, and it’s very worrying because they’re also getting better at isolating these places.”
He said his group had documented 750 arrests, most of them in the Damascus suburbs, though he had no precise figures for Homs and Baniyas.
The uprising began in mid-March with protests in Dara’a, a town near Tafas and the border with Jordan. The protesters gathered after security forces arrested and mistreated high school students for scrawling antigovernment graffiti. The unrest soon spread, with successive Fridays in which thousands took to the streets in dozens of towns. The military’s presence in Tafas on Sunday suggests that the plight of Dara’a, part of a landscape knit tightly by extended clan loyalties, has roiled the region around it, a fertile but drought-stricken plateau famous for wheat and vineyards.
The military said it was withdrawing from Dara’a last week, and while armed columns were filmed departing, residents say the military remains in force. Townspeople were allowed to leave their homes Sunday from 8 a.m. to noon, activists said, and intermittent electricity and water were restored to some areas.
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