Syrian Troops Reportedly Enter Restive Coastal City

The military’s move against Baniyas, a predominantly Sunni Muslim city that witnessed some of the largest protests in nationwide demonstrations a day earlier, was another signal that the Syrian government was determined to crush by force dissent that has posed a sweeping challenge to President Bashar al-Assad’s 11-year rule.

It comes nearly two weeks after the military stormed Dara’a, a poor town near the Jordanian border where protests galvanized demonstrations across the country.

Reports were scant, as the military succeeded in blocking communication with most people in the town. Opposition groups, relying on their networks there, said the military entered the city from three directions before dawn and that civilians were forming human shields to block their deployment. There were no immediate reports of fatalities, but opposition groups reported hearing intense gunfire over the phone lines.

Gunboats were spotted off the coast.

“Landlines and cell phones have been out since dawn and power outages are spreading,” one activist said on condition of anonymity, citing reports from Baniyas.

For days, residents had braced for an attack on Baniyas, as the Syrian military deployed scores of tanks and armored vehicles to the city’s southern outskirts. Paramilitary groups were said to have massed at its northern edge, populated by the minority Alawite sect, from which Mr. Assad’s government draws much of its support.

“They are preparing a scenario to justify raiding the city, they don’t have one yet and that is why they haven’t entered yet,” a resident there said by phone Friday. “When they will do they will make Baniyas a lesson to all the Syrians, and it is going to be ugly.”

On Friday, security forces fired on demonstrators in six Syrian towns and cities in a day of protests that activists declared a “Friday of Defiance,” killing 26. But a withering crackdown subdued the most restive town and prevented many protesters from gathering in larger demonstrations, activists and human rights groups said.

The worst violence was reported in Homs, Syria’s third-largest city, where activists described a chaotic, bloody day, as tanks entered the town. The government said 10 soldiers were killed there by what it described as “terrorists,” while activists said at least nine soldiers had defected to their side. Sixteen protesters were killed, they said.

Only in Baniyas and Jassem, a town near Dara’a, were demonstrators able to mass in larger protests. The resident in Baniyas said that protesters there had carried olive branches and red and white roses to hand to soldiers if the troops entered the city, but by evening they had not. He estimated that the crowd numbered at least 7,000, many of whom chanted for freedom, for the government’s fall and for the military to lift its siege of Dara’a. “Peaceful, peaceful,” he quoted them as chanting, “our demands are patriotic.”

Authorities have described Baniyas as a center of militant Islamists and even some activists acknowledge that they have a presence there, though by no means the majority. Civic leaders in Baniyas have insisted that the charge is a government ploy to stoke tensions between Sunni Muslims and Alawites, one of the fault lines in a country beset by smoldering sectarian tensions among the Sunni Muslim majority and minorities of Christians and heterodox Muslim sects. Eastern Syria is populated by an ethnic minority, Kurds, who appeared to turn out in greater numbers in the streets on Friday.

Mr. Assad, who inherited power from his father, Hafez, in 2000, initially claimed that Syria was immune to the tumult sweeping the Arab world. When the uprising erupted in Dara’a, he initially responded with a mix of crackdown and concessions that proved largely rhetorical. For the past two weeks, the government has almost entirely relied on force, and there appears to be a sense in official circles that the government has the upper hand. In addition to Baniyas, the towns on the capital’s outskirts, along with Homs, Syria’s third-largest city, and its hinterland have proven especially restive.

Activists said they had reports that electricity was cut to some of Damascus’ suburbs, which are said to be suffused with checkpoints and soldiers.

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Security Forces Fire on Protesters in Restive Syrian City

The crowd had gathered to protest a deadly crackdown by the security forces, who activists say killed 14 demonstrators on Sunday. Tensions mounted throughout the day, and at about 2:10 a.m. on Tuesday the forces began firing again, witnesses said.

Shortly before 3 a.m., a woman who lives near the square said by cellphone: “Shooting is heard echoing through the city. The mosques are all calling for help. We fear that many are killed in the square, that it’s a massacre.” By early afternoon on Tuesday, The Associated Press reported, people were staying inside their homes and the streets were largely deserted.

Razan Zeitouneh, an activist with the Syrian Human Rights Information Link in Damascus, said she heard shots over the phone while talking to a distraught friend in the square. He told her that he saw four people killed and dozens injured.

The renewed protests amounted to a rejection of concessions outlined by President Bashar al-Assad in a televised address Saturday, notably lifting the country’s 48-year-old state of emergency by the end of this week.

At the funeral processions in Homs on Monday, mourners in New Clock Tower Square at first offered traditional prayers for the dead. But then protesters began clapping and chanting against Mr. Assad as funeral marchers lofted coffins overhead.

Security forces fired in the air in the afternoon, witnesses said by telephone, but the crowds refused to disperse. At 7:45 p.m. a protester reported that security forces had begun surrounding the square as the crowd chanted, “A sit-in, a sit-in until the overthrow of the regime!”

The activists were calling the square “Tahrir” — the Arabic word for liberation and the name of the square in Cairo where mass protests toppled President Hosni Mubarak in February.

“They want to create a Tahrir-like moment, a watershed event,” said Ammar Abdulhamid, a Syrian opposition leader based in Maryland who is in touch with some of the young activists.

Another human rights activist, Rassem al-Atassy, said by telephone from Homs during the day, “The people are in charge in the city center now.”

Ahmad, 28, a university student at the Homs protest, said: “We people of Homs are calling for three days’ general strike to show our rejection of the cold-blooded killing of peaceful protesters. Homs is boiling and no one can tell you what will happen in the near future.”

Mr. Abdulhamid said the activists in the square were unarmed, but had organized themselves to sleep in shifts, anticipating an overnight confrontation.

Late Monday night, the state news agency, SANA, reported that the Interior Ministry was calling the unrest “an armed mutiny” led by radical Salafi Muslims.

“The ministry added that these armed groups have committed vicious crimes that the law would punish with the strongest penalties,” SANA said. “Those groups aim to create chaos and terrify the Syrian people, exploiting the reform and freedom process launched within a comprehensive program according to specific timetables announced by President Bashar al-Assad.”

Radwan Ziadeh, a Syrian human rights activist who is a visiting scholar at George Washington University, said the ministry’s statement suggested that Syria’s government was planning a showdown with protesters.

“I’m very concerned about the statement,” Mr. Ziadeh said. “This is a justification for what they intend to do in next few hours. This is the green light for armed confrontation.

“I’ve just talked to five or six protesters in Homs, and there are lots of women and children in the square, families, the women making sandwiches. From the minarets they were calling for more to join the demonstration. They estimated there were 50,000 by now.

“But all the communication has been cut now. I lost them.”

Ms. Zeitouneh, of the Syrian Human Rights Information Link, said as many as 20 people might have died in Homs on Sunday. Security forces opened fire on a crowd of protesters with live ammunition and tear gas, said another witness reached by phone.

State media reported that an army officer, Brig. Gen. Khodir al-Tilawi, two of his sons, and a nephew were ambushed, shot to death and brutally mutilated by “armed criminal groups.”

Ms. Zeitouneh also said she had received reports from the coastal town of Latakia that security forces had opened fire Sunday night on protesters there as well. The number of casualties was not immediately known.

Wissam Tarif, executive director of Insan, a Syrian human rights group, said that five died in Latakia.

Human rights activists said on Monday that forces in both Homs and Latakia were arresting wounded protesters inside local hospitals, leading a doctor in Homs to say that as many as a dozen patients in critical condition might have died in detention.

The Syrian protests coincided with new disclosures that in 2005 the United States began to secretly finance some Syrian opposition groups intent on toppling Mr. Assad. The disclosures, in diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks, showed State Department funding for Barada TV, an anti-Assad satellite broadcaster run by Syrian exiles in London, as well as concern by American diplomats in Syria that Syrian intelligence agents began to suspect the financing two years ago.

Liam Stack reported from Cairo, and Katherine Zoepf from New York. An employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Damascus, Syria, Scott Shane from Washington, and J. David Goodman from New York.