Syrian troops opened fire on demonstrators on Friday, as tens of thousands of people poured out of the mosques after midday prayers and staged protests against the government of president Bashar al-Assad, according to the Independent.
[youtube 9flGn0y2_d0 nolink]
The BBC and other news organizations were prevented from covering the protests, but Assad’s security forces were reported to have killed at least 20 people near Deraa in southern Syria.
The conciliatory atmosphere surrounding the concessions that were made on Thursday (see “25-Mar-11 News — Syria’s desperate president Assad tries concessions to appease protesters”) apparently did not last more than a few hours.
The protests were triggered over a week ago when security forces arrested a dozen children in Deraa for writing anti-government graffiti on a wall. Since then, Deraa has been the center of most of the protests.
Around Damascus, police used batons to break up demonstrations of around a thousand people. There were rallies in most other Syrian cities.
In an extraordinary show of defiance, footage posted on Youtube (see video above) shows protesters in Deraa trying to topple a statue of the late president Hafez Assad, the current president’s father. The protestors were driven off by gunfire, presumably from the security forces, according to the LA Times.
I can remember nostalgically periods last year when days would go by and there was hardly anything to write about. Now there are about ten crises going on simultaneously, and it’s very hard to keep up. The world is changing very quickly and very dramatically.
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