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forces killed dozens of demonstrators in the south.
In the southern city of Deraa, which has been in revolt for a week, gunfire and tear gas scattered a crowd of thousands after people lit a fire under a statue of late president Hafez al-Assad, whose son Bashar has ruled since his death in 2000.
Al Jazeera aired comments by a man who said security forces had killed 20 people yesterday in the nearby town of Sanamein.
In Hama, in the centre of the country, where the elder Assad put down an Islamist revolt in 1982 at a cost of many thousands of lives, residents said people streamed through the streets after weekly prayers chanting “Freedom is ringing out!” – a slogan heard in uprisings sweeping the rest of the Arab world.
The same chant had earlier marked funeral processions in Deraa for some of the at least 37 people killed on Wednesday, when security agents attacked pro-democracy groups at a mosque. In all, 44 deaths have been reported in the past week in Deraa.
Security men, on alert across the country during weekly prayers at mosques, quickly stifled a small demonstration in the capital Damascus. They hauled away dozens among a crowd of some 200 who chanted their support for people of Deraa.
In Tel, near Damascus, about 1,000 people rallied and chanted slogans calling relatives of Assad “thieves”.
In Deraa itself, a bastion of the Sunni majority which resents the power and wealth amassed by the Alawite elite around Assad, a Reuters correspondent saw thousands rally unchallenged until the sound of heavy gunfire sent them running for cover.
Unrest in Deraa came to a head this week after police detained more than a dozen schoolchildren for writing graffiti against the government. In Damascus, a couple of protests by a few dozen people shouting slogans were broken up last week.
Among the targets of the crowd’s anger yesterday was Maher al-Assad, a brother of the president and head of the Republican Guard, a special security force, and Rami Makhlouf, a cousin who runs big businesses and is accused by Washington of corruption.
Allied with Shi’ite, non-Arab Iran against the Western powers and neighbouring Israel, Assad’s Syria sits at the heart of a complex web of conflict in the Middle East.
His anti-Israel stance has protected him against some of the criticism aimed, for example, at Egypt’s deposed leader Hosni Mubarak, who defended a peace treaty with the Jewish state. – Reuters.