Syria Dissidents Meet as Crackdown Claims More Lives

Representatives of Syria's six-month-old protest movement joined opposition parties in Turkey on Saturday to forge a united front against Bashar Assad's regime after violence claimed at least 19 more lives.

Clashes between security forces and deserters killed 11 people in a village in Hama province on Friday, while another eight died during a crackdown on protests in flashpoint Homs, human rights activists said.

One group, the Local Coordination Committees, put Friday's death toll as high as 23.

Thousands of protesters had taken to the streets on the Muslim weekly day of prayer, a lightning rod in the protests against President Assad in which the United Nations says 2,700 people have been killed.

The protests were held under the slogan "victory for our Syria and our Yemen."

In Istanbul, meanwhile, the Syrian National Council, a group seeking to unite Assad's opponents, was opening a two-day meeting on Saturday to elect a leadership and thrash out a recruitment policy.

Elsewhere on the political front, Syria's ambassador to the United States Imad Mustapha was called in to the State Department and "read the riot act" about an attempted attack on U.S. ambassador Robert Ford.

A mob of nearly 100 Syrians chanting hostile slogans tried to storm an office in Damascus where Ford had arrived to meet opposition figure Hassan Abdelazim on Thursday.

Mustapha "was reminded that Ambassador Ford is the personal representative of the president (Barack Obama) and an attack on Ford is an attack on the United States," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters.

Ford spoke on his Facebook page Friday about the incident, saying the damage to the vehicles could not have been done "by eggs and tomatoes."

"Protesters threw concrete blocks at the windows and hit the cars with iron bars," he said.

The Assad regime had earlier accused Washington of inciting "armed groups" to commit violence against its army.

The U.N. Security Council remains divided over whether to threaten Assad's regime with sanctions over its deadly crackdown on dissent.

European nations on Friday dropped the word "sanctions" from a proposed resolution on Syria in a bid to temper Russian opposition.

France, Britain, Germany and Portugal instead called for "targeted measures" in their draft text.

Russia and China have threatened to veto any resolution calling for punitive measures against Damascus.