Syrian forces storm border town near Turkey

Syrian troops and gunmen loyal to President Bashar al-Assad stormed a town near the Turkish border on Saturday, burning houses and arresting dozens, witnesses said, in a persistent military campaign to crush popular revolt. The latest assault followed another Friday of protests, which have grown in size and scope over the last three months, despite Assad's violent clampdown on public dissent.
Activists said security forces shot dead 19 protesters on Friday. "They came at 7 am to Bdama. I counted nine tanks, 10 armoured carriers, 20 jeeps and 10 buses. I saw shabbiha (pro-Assad gunmen) setting fire to two houses," said Saria Hammouda, a lawyer living in the border town, in the Jisr al-Shughour region, where thousands of Syrians had fled to nearby Turkey after the army clamped down on the area earlier in the month.
Bdama is one of the nerve centres providing food and supplies to several thousand other Syrians who have escaped the violence from frontier villages but chose to take shelter temporarily in fields on the Syrian side of the boundary. "Bdama's residents don't dare take bread to the refugees and the refugees are fearful of arrests if they go into Bdama for food," Rami Abdulrahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told Reuters. Another witness said government troops were also burning crops near hillsides in an apparent scorched earth policy.
European powers initiated a detente with Assad prior to the street unrest to try to draw the authoritarian Syrian leader, whose family has dominated Syria for 41 years, away from Iran and also stabilise Lebanon. But they now say Damascus should face tougher sanctions over the violence against demonstrators seeking more political freedoms and an end to corruption, the impunity of political leaders and their allies, and poverty. Syrian rights groups say at least 1,300 civilians have been killed and 10,000 people detained since March.
"SECURITY GRIP IS WEAKENING"S Tens of thousands rallied across Syria on Friday, defying Assad's repression and ignoring a pledge that his tycoon cousin Rami Makhlouf, a symbol of corruption among the elite, would renounce his business empire and channel his wealth to charity.
Witnesses and activists said people rallied in the southern province of Deraa where the revolt began, as well as in the Kurdish north-east, the province of Deir al-Zor, which borders Iraq's Sunni heartland, the city of Hama north of Damascus, the Mediterranean coast and suburbs of the capital itself.
"The security grip is weakening because the protests are growing in numbers and spreading. More people are risking their lives to demonstrate. The Syrian people realise that this is an opportunity for liberty that comes once in hundreds of years," opposition figure Walid al-Bunni told Reuters from Damascus.
The worst bloodshed on Friday was in Homs, a merchant city of 1 million people in central Syria, where the Local Co-ordination Committees, a main activist group linked to protesters, said 10 demonstrators were killed. State television said a policeman was killed by gunmen. One protester was also reported killed in the northern commercial hub of Aleppo, the first to die there in the unrest. The state news agency SANA said nine people, including civilians and police, were killed in attacks by gunmen.