Syria Violence Kills at Least 25

Violence across Syria killed at least 25people on Saturday as security forces fired at a Damascus funeral for protesters who died the previous day during demonstrations, monitors said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said a child was killed on Saturday by rocket fire in the Bayada area of Homs, where troops fired shells at rebels in its Khaldiyeh district at the rate of one a minute.

Forces opened fire as thousands paid tribute to two protesters in the capital's Kfar Sousa district after they were gunned down on Friday during anti-regime rallies, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

At Kafaroma, in the northwestern region of Idlib, security forces killed a civilian who chanted anti-regime slogans when they arrested his father and brother during a raid, the group said.

The town was the site of a massive protest on Friday to denounce the Arab world's inaction in the face of President Bashar Assad's bloody crackdown on the year-old uprising.

Elsewhere in the same province, scene of fierce clashes between troops and rebels in recent weeks, a civilian and his sister were killed during an assault on the town of Jisr al-Shughur, said the Observatory.

In the central city of Homs, focus of the embattled Syrian regime's military campaign to crush armed rebels, rocket fire killed a child in the neighborhood of Bayada.

Shells pounded the Homs district of Khaldiyeh, where most of the rebels are holed up, at the rate of around one a minute, it added.

Random gunfire killed two civilians in Talbisseh, a town about 10 kilometers from the border with Lebanon, the Britain-based monitoring group said.

In Daraa province, where the uprising broke out in March 2011, one soldier was killed in a rebel attack on an armored personnel carrier, triggering clashes between the two sides.

Heavy fighting was also reported at dawn in Jarmana, Damascus province, following hours of clashes in the district of Jobar, according to the monitors.

The United Nations says more than 9,000 people have been killed in the crackdown by Assad's forces on the Arab Spring-inspired uprising that began with pro-democracy protests.