4 Dead, Scores Hurt as Protesters Rally on Syria's Independence Day
At least four people were killed and around 50 wounded when Syrian security forces opened fire on a funeral procession in Talbisseh near the central town of Homs on Sunday, witnesses said.
Regime supporters also broke up two rallies in southern Syria, wounding five people after a presidential vow to end emergency rule within a week was dismissed as not enough and was followed by new protests.
Meanwhile, opposition-affiliated Flash News Network reported that 15 protesters were killed in Talbisseh.
For its part, Facebook page Syrian Revolution 2011 identified two protesters killed in Talbisseh as Bilal Bakkour and Kamal al-Yehia.
The page also reported that four protesters were killed in the country's major port, Latakia, as Al-Arabiya satellite TV network, citing witnesses, reported the presence of dead bodies on the streets of the city’s al-Tabiyat neighborhood.
Around 10,000 people took to the streets of Latakia late on Sunday after the funeral of a protester killed on Friday, a rights activist told Agence France Presse.
Security forces "opened fire on a crowd of thousands of people" in Homs at the funeral of a man killed in the area the previous day, witnesses told AFP by telephone.
"At least four people were killed, but the toll could be much higher. There were also more than 50 wounded," one witness said.
Sunday's protests followed a Saturday televised address by President Bashar al-Assad promising to end emergency rule, in force since 1963 when the Baath party took power, within a week.
Emergency law in force since 1963 restricts public gatherings and movement, authorizes the interrogation of any individual and the monitoring of private communications and imposes media censorship.
In a televised address to the new cabinet charged with launching reforms, Assad also expressed his sorrow over the deaths of an estimated 200 people in a month of protests demanding greater freedoms.
"We are sad for all the people we have lost and all the people injured, and consider them all martyrs," he said in his address.
"The Syrian people are respectable. They love the regime and reject chaos," Assad said, and called for a national dialogue.
At least five demonstrators were wounded when regime agents dispersed two pro-freedom rallies in the south, bastion of Syria's Druze minority, rights activists said.
Some 400 people had gathered to celebrate Independence Day in Suweida, said Mazen Darwish, director of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression.
Demonstrators carried portraits of the leaders of the revolution that ended French rule and chanted slogans calling for freedom, he told AFP.
But regime backers cut short the rally, he said, beating protesters and trampling on portraits of Syrian revolutionary leaders who fought to end the French mandate.
In the southern town of Daraa, nerve center of more than a month of anti-regime protests, upwards of 4,000 people, including former political prisoners and religious leaders, staged another rally.
They chanted anti-regime slogans, said a rights activist who requested anonymity.
In the northern coastal town of Banias, which has been shaken by a deadly security crackdown and shootings that residents blame on regime thugs and agents, 2,500 people demonstrated, a rights activist told AFP.
They marched under banners that read: "You are in Banias, not in Israel" in a rebuke to officials blaming the violence on foreign plotters.
Assad, who has ruled Syria since the death of his father Hafez in 2000, told his cabinet to replace draconian emergency laws within seven days.
But rights activists said the gesture fell short of protesters' demands.
Rami Abdul Rahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Sunday that canceling "military courts" and revoking a law granting security agents immunity were also necessary.
And prominent Syrian human rights lawyer Haytham Maleh told AFP: "It is a step, but it is not enough. It must be accompanied by reform of the judicial system which is corrupted."
Maleh called for the release of political prisoners and said "interference by the security services in the lives of the citizens must stop."
"Demonstrators must be allowed to protest," said Maleh who was released under a presidential pardon in March after more than two years in jail.
Shortly after Assad's address, 2,000 people rallied against the regime in Daraa, the official SANA news agency reported.
Source: Agence France Presse
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