On Friday, The Lede is following the war in Libya and protest movements across the Middle East and North Africa. Updates below mix alerts on breaking news with reports and observations from journalists and bloggers in the region. For a summary of the latest developments in Syria, read the frequently updated main news article from my colleagues Liam Stack and Katherine Zoepf.
Video posted online by Syrian activists is said to show protests continuing in Damascus, the capital, on Friday night.
Despite the fact that Internet use is monitored and limited in Syria, activists again managed to upload dozens of video clips of protests to Facebook and YouTube on Friday.
On Thursday, one of the activists involved in the effort to document the demonstrations told Reuters that a network of citizen journalists in Syria has been using secure connections and satellite telephones to get the video out. The activist, who goes by the name Abu Adnan, explained in an interview from Syria that the work was extremely dangerous: “Four friends of mine died. One was in Douma [a Damascus suburb], filming with me. A sniper on rooftop chose him. He could have chosen me. One was executed after he refused to stop on his motorcycle. One was arrested and released dead and one was shot in Dara’a.”
Still, the activist argued, the work he and his friends are doing is necessary because Syria’s state-controlled media is “fabricating what is happening in Syria.”
While interested observers outside of Syria are paying quite a lot of attention to the video of protests and clashes appearing on YouTube and Facebook, the 80 percent of Syria’s population without Internet access is more likely to be hearing Syrian state television’s very different explanation of what is happening in the country.
On Thursday, the man in charge of Syria’s state media, Adnan Hassan Mahmoud, was named President Bashar al-Assad’s information minister.
Under his guidance, Syria’s state media has continued to insist that the unrest has been entirely generated by a foreign conspiracy.
On Wednesday, as the state news agency’s English-language Web site reported, Syrian state television broadcast what it called confessions from members of a terrorist cell. Three Syrian men featured in the report said that they had been paid to sow unrest in Syria by a Lebanese politician, Jamal al Jarra, who also supplied them with weapons and told to shoot demonstrators in order to frame the Syrian security forces.
Mr. Jarra, who immediately denied the allegations, is a member of the Lebanese Parliament and of a party led by former Prime Minister Saad Hariri, whose anti-Syrian father, Rafik Hariri, was assassinated in 2005.
Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Syrian state television claimed this week that these three men had confessed to receiving weapons and instructions to cause unrest in Syria from a Lebanese politician.
The purported leader of the terror cell claimed that an intermediary for the Lebanese politician had agreed “to provide us with a car resembling that of the security forces, in addition to highly sophisticated telephones. We assigned someone with the task of taking photos [of] the injured and the killed people and sending the photos directly to the so-called al-Thawra Web site (Revolution) on Facebook.” He added that his “armed group” was instructed “to appear as police officers or security members when we will attack … and we must kill people.”
Another member of the group, who said that they had also been tasked with stirring up protests, said that they did so by paying people to attend, insisting that, “most people who are going out for demonstrations are doing so, because they are paid money.”
The Lede is signing off for the evening but will continue to cover the protest movements sweeping the Middle East and North Africa in the days and weeks ahead. In the meantime, please visit the home page of NYTimes.com to read reports from my colleagues in the region. Thanks for your comments and tips.
Video posted online by Syrian activists appears to show protesters fleeing in the coastal city of Latakia on Friday as the security forces opened fire.
This clip, which ends with graphic images of a man who appears to have been shot and killed, begins with marchers suddenly scattering as gunshots are heard:
In this clip, also said to have been filmed in Latakia on Friday, protesters appear to take cover as gunshots are fired:
The daughter of a prominent human rights activist in Bahrain wrote on Friday that she will not stop a hunger strike she began this week.
As The Lede reported on Tuesday, Zainab Alkhawaja, whose father, husband and brother-in-law were all arrested in a predawn raid last week, began a fast on Monday. She reiterated on Friday that she intends to eat nothing until her family members are released from custody.
Ms. Alkhawaja, who has documented the protest movement in Bahrain on her Angry Arabiya Twitter feed, posted a series of updates on the social network on Friday in which she explained that she been feeling “dizzy and weak and having a lot of pain.” She added that, under pressure from her family, she would start “be drinking 1 glass of sugar water a day,” but would continue not to eat until her family members are released by Bahrain’s government.
That Ms. Alkhawaja’s strike has caught the attention of the foreign media – earlier this week she was interviewed by several news organizations, including The Guardian and The Associated Press – has clearly upset some supporters of Bahrain’s monarchy who use the Web to make their case. After The Lede communicated with her via Twitter this week, several users of the social network posted nearly identical messages attacking this blog’s author. Some of the same people posted similar attacks on Robert Booth, a Guardian journalist who has been writing about Ms. Alkhawaja.
Another Bahraini blogger even resorted to the tactic of setting up an “AngryArabyia” Twitter account, which is a parody version of Ms. Alkhawaja’s Twitter feed, using the same cartoon icon as the original and a slight misspelling her user name. That mock feed is a stream of vicious attacks on the hunger striker, mixed with obscene and off-color jokes implying that Ms. Alkhawaja is a phony. It also employs a backdrop of hamburgers to taunt the hunger striker.
As my colleagues Liam Stack and Katherine Zoepf report, protest marches in several parts of Syria on Friday were reportedly met with tear gas, beatings and gunfire.
These video clips are said to have been filmed as the security forces fired shots to prevent protesters from crossing a bridge into Abasseyeen Square in the heart of Damascus:
This video is said to show a large number of protesters heading into Damascus from a suburb earlier in the day:
This video is said to have been filmed in Darayya, another Damascus suburb on Friday:
This video, which Syrian activists said was filmed on Friday in the coastal city of Latakia, appears to show the security forces on the streets, as protesters chant; “Peaceful! Peaceful!”
According to the activist who uploaded this clip, which begins with graphic images of a dead or badly wounded man, it was filmed in Latakia on Friday as protesters were dispersed by gunshots:
At the end of this clip, which is said to show the body of a dead protester being carried from a street in Latakia on Friday, a man in plan clothes who appears to be with the protesters is carrying a rifle:
Video of more peaceful protests was also posted on Facebook and YouTube by Syrian activists on Friday.
This clip appears to show a large protest in the southern city of Dara’a, where dozens of protesters have been killed since the unrest began:
This video is said to show a large rally in the town of Jassem, outside Dara’a:
These clips are said to show a large number of protesters on the streets of Homs, in central Syria:
According to the activist who writes on Twitter as Anonymous Syria, this video shows protesters destroying the country’s biggest statue of Hafez al-Assad, the father of Syria’s current president, in Al Rastan, outside Homs:
These two clips are said to show protesters in the village of Bayda, in northwestern Syria – in the second, they chant: “The people want to topple the regime!”
Don’t miss a new report from Misurata by my colleague C.J. Chivers, which begins:
Military forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, who have surrounded this city and vowed to crush its anti-Qaddafi rebellion, have been firing into residential neighborhoods with heavy weapons, including cluster bombs that have been banned by much of the world and ground-to-ground rockets, according to the accounts of witnesses and survivors and physical evidence on the ground.
Such “indiscriminate” weapons, which strike large areas with a dense succession of high-explosive munitions, by their nature cannot be fired precisely, and when fired into populated areas place civilians at grave risk.
Mr. Chivers, a former soldier who has written extensively about weapons, has been posting images of the arms used in Libya on his own Web site, CJChivers.com.
This video, showing some of the physical destruction to Misurata caused by weeks of shelling by government forces, was posted online by Libyan activists this week:
As we noted in our previous update, Tarek Shalaby, an Egyptian activist and blogger, has been documenting a protest by Coptic Christian in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on Bambuser, a video-streaming site.
Mr. Shalaby, who was among the activists who camped in the square during the protests against Hosni Mubarak, explains on Twitter that he is observing the Copts’ protest in good revolutionary company. He is accompanied by his sister, Nora Shalaby, another Egyptian revolutionary, their cousin Muhammed Radwan, an Egyptian-American who was detained in Syria last month while observing a protest there, and a friend, Adel Abdel Ghafar, who drove to Libya to deliver medical supplies to the eastern city of Benghazi in the first days of that uprising.
All four of the activists have been posting updates on the march on their Twitter feeds.
Tarek Shalaby, an activist and blogger, is transmitting live video of a new protest by Egyptian Christians taking place right now in Cairo’s Tahrir Square from his phone using the video streaming service Bambuser:
Other clips of the protest, shot within the past hour, are archived on Mr. Shalaby’s Bambuser channel.
As my colleagues Liam Stack and Katherine Zoepf report, “Protesters gathered again in large numbers in cities across Syria on Friday to demand reforms, defying a nationwide crackdown in which dozens of demonstrators have been killed in regular rounds of gunfire from security forces.”
Although severe restrictions on independent reporting in Syria have limited the number of foreign observers of the unrest there, Syrian activists have become adept at recording and posting video of the protests online. Dozens of clips, all said to have been shot in cities and towns across Syria on Friday, have already been posted on Facebook pages and YouTube channels maintained by opponents of President Bashar al-Assad’s ruling Baath Party.
Given the restraints placed on journalists by Syria’s government, The Times cannot confirm the authenticity of this video, but we invite readers who are familiar with Syria to help us annotate these clips by posting comments in the thread below. If you see a landmark that you can identify, hear a chant that is interesting, or see any detail that might suggest that a clip was not recorded on Friday, please let us know.
According to Wissam Tarif, a Syrian human rights activist, thousands of protesters from suburbs of the capital, Damascus, tried to march to the city center, but were dispersed by the security forces.
This video, posted on the Sham News YouTube channel, is said to show protesters outside a mosque in Damascus, following Friday prayers:
This video is said to show marchers from two suburbs, Harasta and Douma, meeting up:
This clip is said to show protesters in Harasta destroying an image of Syria’s president on a billboard:
This video is said to have been shot during a march in Erbeeen, outside Damascus:
According to the activists who run the Sham News Network YouTube channel, this video was filmed on Friday in Hama, a Syrian city where at least 10,000 people were killed in 1982, during an uprising against the rule of Hafez al-Assad, the current president’s late father:
Another YouTube blogger, who uses the name Abobakersyria, posted this video , described as a protest in the northern city of Aleppo, with a message asking fellow activists to bring it to the attention of journalists:
This video, said to show protesters at a funeral in the northwestern city of Baniyas on Friday, was one of two dozen clips uploaded to the Syrian Free Press YouTube channel:
As The Lede reported on Wednesday, women and children from a village outside Baniyas, Bayda, marched to the main coastal highway outside the city that day to demand the release of hundreds of the town’s men, who had been detained in connection with unrest in Baniyas.
On Thursday, Mr. Tarif, the Syrian rights activists, posted a link on Twitter to this video, said to show the brutal treatment of the men of Bayda by Syrian security forces on Tuesday:
