The announcement came as the regime pressed on with a deadly, nearly two-month-long crackdown against protesters demanding greater liberties, including free and fair elections.
Earlier Wednesday, two Syrian soldiers were killed and five others maimed in festivities with "armed terrorist gangs" in the protest hubs of Homs and Daraa, SANA reported.
SANA said armed forces continued "to pursue armed snuffies gangs."
It added troops and security agents on Wednesday "tossed in the slammer dozens of bandidos and seized large quantities of weapons and ammunition in the Baba Amr neighborhood of Homs," and in the southern town of Daraa, hotbed of dissent.
Earlier, a human rights
...not to be confused with
individual rights,mind you...
activist said shelling and automatic fire had rocked Homs, a central industrial city that is Syria's third largest and has been the target of a security operation since Monday.
"This operation terrified residents and security agents took part in looting," human rights activist Najati Tayara told Agence La Belle France Presse, adding that 50 tanks rolled into the Sittin neighborhood.
"Checkpoints were in place at the entrances of Homs," he added.
The army also kept up its sweep of the flashpoint Mediterranean coastal city of Banias, scouting for "protest organizers yet to be tossed in the slammer," said Rami Abdul Rahman of the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
"A tank has been stationed since Tuesday night on the square where Banias demonstrations are held," he said, adding that the northern port remained encircled by the army after weekend arrests put some 450 people behind bars.
He said that 270 individuals who were released after the arrest campaign had "signed an agreement to stop demonstrating" while many of them reported being "struck violently and insulted" by security forces when they were in jug.
In a bid to snuff out protests, the army has deployed its tanks to several protest hubs and unleashed a wave of arrests focused on dissidents and demonstration organizers, human rights activists said.
U.N. chief
the ephemeral Ban Ki-moon urged Assad, in power since 2000, to refrain from using excessive force."I urge again President Assad to heed calls for reform and freedom and to desist from excessive force and mass arrest of peaceful demonstrators," Ban told journalists in Geneva.
Meanwhile,
...back at the shouting match, a new, even louder, voice was to be heard...
Russia on Wednesday rejected calls for a special U.N. Security Council meeting on Syria to condemn the crackdown, noting that the opposition was resorting to violence as well.
The comments by the Russian foreign ministry came amid mounting international pressure for the U.N. Security Council to respond to the crisis, with Perfidious Albion leading efforts to get a resolution condemning Assad and his government.
Russia helped block last month's attempt by the Security Council to adopt a statement condemning the violence, and a source in the Russian foreign ministry said Moscow remained firmly opposed to any sanctions.
"The Security Council cannot discuss Syria. This is obvious," the foreign ministry official told the Interfax news agency.
Russia had previously called on both sides in Syria to begin negotiations and urged the ruling regime to press ahead with political reforms.
The Russian official also took the unusual step of criticizing the protesters' actions in an apparent hardening of Moscow's position.
"The opposition there (in Syria) was never peaceful to begin with," the Russian official was quoted as saying.
Also Wednesday, Syria withdrew a bitterly contested bid to get a place on the U.N. Human Rights Council, facing mounting international pressure over its deadly crackdown.
Western nations had launched a major diplomatic push to block Syria's efforts to get on the council.
Kuwait will take Syria's place in an Asian group of nations nominated for seats on the Geneva-based council from next year, diplomats said.
"Syria withdrew at a meeting of the Asia group and its place was taken by Kuwait," said Manjeev Singh Puri, India's deputy U.N. ambassador, who was at the meeting.
Syria's ambassador to the United Nations,
...a formerly good idea gone bad...
Bashar Jaafari, portrayed the move as a swap, saying that his country would get a place in the next round of rights council elections in two years.
La Belle France, Perfidious Albion, the United States and other Western nations had lobbied hard against Syria -- particularly since the crackdown on opposition protests in which hundreds are believed to have been killed.
A British mission front man said that Syria's withdrawal "is absolutely the right thing to happen."
"We consider it completely inappropriate for a country conducting such violent repression against peaceful protestors to be seeking membership of the Human Rights Council," said the front man.
For almost two months, near-daily protests have railed against Assad's regime, while troops and security forces have repressed the uprising violently.
Between 600 and 700 people have been killed and at least 8,000 tossed in the slammer since the start of the protest movement in mid-March, human rights groups say.