Hama residents erect barriers to stop tanks re-entering – but say raids are widespread days after biggest anti-regime protest
Nidaa Hassan (pen name of a journalist in Damascus)
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 5 July 2011
"Residents of Hama in Syria are resisting an army advance that has reportedly claimed 14 lives as violence returned to the flash-point city.
Barriers have been erected at entrances Hama to stop tanks and armoured columns re-entering en masse, five days after the largest anti-regime demonstration yet seen in the four month Syrian uprising.
But residents reported that the security forces had easily broken through the barriers and was conducting widespread raids. After a violent weekend at the start of June in which more than 70 people were killed, all security forces withdrew from the city of 800,000 in what demonstrators had viewed at the time as yielding to their demands.
Raids started again soon after the mass rally that drew ire from Damascus and led to the president, Bashar al-Assad, sacking the area's governor.
"The situation is bad – there is security on the streets and gunfire in several neighbourhoods," a Hama resident, who did not want to be names, told the Guardian.
Doctors were appealing for blood donations as security forces and regime loyalists vandalised cars and broke into commercial shops, activists reported....."
Nidaa Hassan (pen name of a journalist in Damascus)
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 5 July 2011
"Residents of Hama in Syria are resisting an army advance that has reportedly claimed 14 lives as violence returned to the flash-point city.
Barriers have been erected at entrances Hama to stop tanks and armoured columns re-entering en masse, five days after the largest anti-regime demonstration yet seen in the four month Syrian uprising.
But residents reported that the security forces had easily broken through the barriers and was conducting widespread raids. After a violent weekend at the start of June in which more than 70 people were killed, all security forces withdrew from the city of 800,000 in what demonstrators had viewed at the time as yielding to their demands.
Raids started again soon after the mass rally that drew ire from Damascus and led to the president, Bashar al-Assad, sacking the area's governor.
"The situation is bad – there is security on the streets and gunfire in several neighbourhoods," a Hama resident, who did not want to be names, told the Guardian.
Doctors were appealing for blood donations as security forces and regime loyalists vandalised cars and broke into commercial shops, activists reported....."
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