DAMASCUS/BEIRUT/BAGHDAD: Violence across Syria killed at least seven people yesterday as security forces fired at a Damascus funeral for protesters who died the previous day during demonstrations, monitors said.Syria's regime declared yesterday it has defeated those seeking to bring it down while reiterating support for a UN-Arab peace plan, as its troops reportedly shelled rebels in the city of Homs.
Meanwhile, 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 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 km 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.