Syrian Protesters Clash With Security Forces

CAIRO — Antigovernment protesters in Syria, unsatisfied with yet more vague promises of reform from President Bashar al-Assad, marched by the thousands in numerous cities on Friday, only to be met with gunfire and other violence that killed at least 10 people, according to residents and human rights groups.

The worst violence was in Douma, a largely working-class neighborhood north of the capital, Damascus, where five or six people were reported killed. In Dara'a, the southwestern city where antigovernment protests first erupted two weeks ago, four died, residents and activists reported, and one person was beaten to death in Kafr Souseh, a neighborhood of Damascus.

“We all went out to protest peacefully,” said a resident of Douma reached by telephone, speaking anonymously out of concern for his safety. “First the security forces confronted us with stones, and then they shot at us with live ammunition.”

As in a number of other Middle Eastern nations, the protesters had gathered after weekly communal prayers at central mosques. In Douma, they were trying to march to the palm-lined central square when the attacks scattered them. Security elements roamed the streets for hours afterward and indiscriminately fell upon anyone afoot, residents and dissidents said, beating them with sticks or shocking them with cattle prods.

A similar pattern developed in other cities, although in Damascus, at the main Umayyad Mosque, government supporters let worshipers out the gates only in groups of about 15, so no crowd could gather, witnesses said.

A huge deployment of security forces in Latakia, a northern coastal city, prevented an estimated 1,500 protesters there from setting up a tent encampment like the one in Tahrir Square in Cairo during Egypt’s recent unrest, dissidents said. But residents were hard to reach, and there were no immediate reports of dead or wounded.

The state-run Syrian Arab News Agency reported that “normal life” had returned to all Syrian provinces. People who attended Friday prayers chanted slogans afterward, calling for “national unity and preserving the security and stability in Syria and thwarting the conspiracy,” it said.

In the barest hint of dissent, the news agency said worshipers in Dara'a and Latakia had chanted for those killed previously and called for “accelerating the measures of reform.” But there were no clashes anywhere with security forces, it said.

All reports emerging from Syria were hard to confirm independently. The government barred most foreign journalists from entering the country, accusing them of being part of a grand conspiracy to destabilize Syria by sowing sectarian violence.

Analysts said the Assad government, which has failed to deliver on promised reform since Mr. Assad inherited the presidency from his father, Hafez al-Assad, in 2000, could not bring itself to change.

“When challenged, this regime will always act violently,” said Volker Perthes, a Syria specialist who heads the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. “The gut reaction of the Syrian system is, once there are protests, quell it violently from the beginning so that people know that it is dangerous.”

Mr. Perthes recalled visiting Syria in 1985 as a university student, when he attended a speech by Hafez al-Assad that was eerily similar to the one his son gave before Parliament on Wednesday. He said the 1985 address, like Wednesday’s, was interrupted by sycophants declaring undying love for the leader.

The current president, Bashar al-Assad, crushed a nascent democracy movement that began to emerge in 2001, after reformists in Parliament and others began to criticize what they saw as a legacy of stagnation from his father’s 30-year rule.

Since then, Mr. Assad has talked about reform often but carried out very little, content to tinker with the absolute rule of the Baath Party and a mostly minority Alawite ruling clique. He enjoys support from a wealthy ruling class, whose members often praise the country’s stability in comparison with unstable neighbors like Iraq and Lebanon, while ignoring the frustrations of average Syrians.

“He missed a big opportunity when he made his speech,” Patrick Seale, the author of an acclaimed biography of Hafez al-Assad, said of the son. “He hates being pushed around. He hates yielding to pressure.”

But the rapid timetable that President Assad set for addressing some longstanding problems indicates he is feeling vulnerable, Mr. Seale said. For example, the 1962 census disenfranchised about 150,000 Kurds, most in the northeast. Mr. Assad said aides would look into the issue and come up with an answer in two weeks. He also promised to quickly study replacing the emergency law in place since 1963.

Protesters in the Kurdish region, as in much of the country, appeared unimpressed on Friday. “Freedom, not citizenship!” they chanted (the line rhymes in Arabic), showing that their priorities had shifted markedly in a short period.

To head off the protests, the government deployed forces across the country, but there were still eruptions in Homs, Baniyas and elsewhere.

“I have never seen as many security forces in Syria as I have today,” Wissam Tarif, head of the human rights group Insan, said by phone from Damascus. They raided the apartments of suspected protesters in the capital, looking for cellphones and cameras, “anything that could record what is happening,” Mr. Tarif said. Dozens were arrested across the country, dissidents said.

In Dara'a, security forces fired tear gas to disperse protesters, said Ahmed al-Sayasna, the imam who led Friday prayers at the central mosque. Dara'a has been largely sealed off by the military, so it was hard to piece together events. But reports from people in Syria and people outside monitoring events there suggested that hundreds of protesters trying to march to the nearby city of Sanamein were fired on by the police and that five of the marchers died.

Dissidents from the Syrian Human Rights Information Link say 73 people have been killed in Daraa by security forces since the protests began, among 103 such deaths nationwide.