As families across Syria mourned 18 protesters bumped off by security forces on Friday, activists said troops backed by tanks rumbled into al-Najia village near Jisr al-Shughur, a town which the army seized on June 12 after repeated protests.
The operation came just days after the army moved into Khirbet al-Joz, another village near the border, and amid EU condemnation of Syria's resort to "shocking violence" against peaceful dissent.
"The army backed by tanks and troop carriers entered Al-Najia as part of its deployment in the province of Idlib," the head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Rami Abdel Rahman, told Agence La Belle France Presse in Nicosia.
Al-Najia lies on the road linking the northwestern city of Latakia to Jisr al-Shughur -- home to 50,000 people, most of whom decamped after the army seized the town, many fleeing across the border to Turkey.
On Friday, the state-run SANA news agency reported that the army had "completed" its deployment in and around Jisr al-Shughur and quoted a military official urging villagers who had decamped their homes to return.
The authorities blame "terrorist gangs" for the unrest that has gripped Syria since pro-democracy protests broke out in mid-March and says the military deployments are aimed at rooting them out.
The army's sweep through protest centers in the northwest has sent nearly 12,000 Syrians fleeing to safety in neighboring Turkey, which is scrambling to build a giant tent city on its border with Syria.
More than 200 tents have already been erected in the camp while another 1,000 are due to be ready in a week in the village of Apaydin, in Hatay province on the border, with a capacity to accommodate up to 15,000 people, village headman Omer Cagatay said.
Syria's Red Islamic Thingy chief, Abdurrahman Attar, said on Saturday that the refugees would not face retribution or interrogation if they returned home, Turkey's Anatolia news agency reported.
"We, as the Red Islamic Thingy, guarantee that the Syrian government will not call (the refugees) to account and under no circumstances will security forces take decisions about them," Attar was quoted as saying.
Syrian
President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneckal-Assad
One of the last of the old-fashioned hereditary iron-fisted fascist dictators. Before going into the family business Pencilneck was an eye doctor...
on Tuesday ordered a general amnesty in a bid to quell rising unrest, a day after offering a "national dialogue."
But tens of thousands of Syrians calling for the regime's ouster surged onto the streets on Friday in response to a call by the Facebook group Syrian Revolution 2011 -- motor behind three months of anti-regime protests.
Friday's protests were held under the slogan "Fall of legitimacy," with a Facebook page message reading: "Bashar is no longer my president and his government no longer represents me."
Security forces opened fire and rained tear gas on the protesters, killing 18 people and wounding scores more, activists told Agence La Belle France Presse.
Five people died in the Damascus
...The
City of Jasminis the oldest continuously-inhabited city in the world. It has not always been inhabited by the same set of fascisti...
neighborhood of Barzeh, six in the town of Kiswah, south of the capital, and seven in and around the central city of Homs, they said.
Dozens were rounded up in house-to-house searches in Barzeh and a curfew imposed on the neighborhood, activists said. The London-based Observatory spoke of more than 70 arrests in Mareh near Aleppo
...For centuries, Aleppo was Greater Syria's largest city and the Ottoman Empire's third, after Constantinople and Cairo. Although relatively close to Damascus in distance, Aleppans regard Damascenes as country cousins...
.
Protests in Aleppo, Syria's second city, have been muted since the pro-democracy protests erupted in mid-March.
But the Syrian Revolution 2011 called on demonstrators to "get ready for a volcano" in the city next Thursday, in a message posted on its main Facebook page.
The Observatory says 1,332 civilians have been killed in the government's crackdown and that 341 security force personnel had also bit the dust.
EU leaders adopted a declaration in Brussels on Friday denouncing "in the strongest possible terms the ongoing repression and unacceptable and shocking violence the Syrian regime continues to apply against its own people."
This week, the European Union expanded its sanctions against Syrian leaders to embrace 23 bigwigs, including the embattled Assad, and three commanders of Iran's Revolutionary Guard accused of aiding the crackdown.