IRAN SAID yesterday that five of its technicians had been kidnapped in the Syrian city of Homs, according to the semi-official Mehr news agency.
“The five were kidnapped on Wednesday at 6.30am while heading to their work place,” Mehr reported, quoting a statement from the Iranian embassy in Damascus. “We demand their immediate release,” the embassy said.
Syria’s state news agency, SANA, reported that eight engineers “of different nationalities” had disappeared after travelling by bus to work at a power plant in Homs province.
The Syrian government is under mounting international pressure to end its crackdown on a nine-month protest movement that has turned violent.
Kidnappings and killings based on religious identity are increasingly common in flashpoints such as Homs, sparking international and regional concern over sustained sectarian bloodshed in Syria.
Meanwhile Rami Abdulrahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put at 111 the number of civilians and activists killed on Tuesday. Syrian government forces surrounded them in the foothills of the Jabal al-Zawiyah region in Idlib province and unleashed two hours of bombardment and heavy gunfire.
Another 100 army deserters were either wounded or killed, making it the “bloodiest day of the Syrian revolution”, Mr Abdulrahman said.
“There was a massacre of unprecedented scale in Syria on Tuesday,” said French foreign ministry spokesman Bernard Valero. “It is urgent that the UN Security Council issues a firm resolution that calls for an end to the repression.”
The US said it was deeply disturbed by reports of indiscriminate killing and warned Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, the violence must stop. Britain said it was shocked by the reports and urged Syria to “end immediately its brutal violence against civilians”.
Events in Syria are hard to verify because authorities, who say they are fighting terrorists who have killed more than 1,100 soldiers and police, have banned most independent reporting. Tuesday’s bloodshed brought the death toll reported by activists in the last 48 hours to more than 200.
The main opposition, the Syrian National Council, said “gruesome murders” were carried out, including the beheading of a local imam. It demanded international action to protect civilians.
The escalating death toll in nine months of popular unrest has raised the spectre of civil war in Syria, with the country’s president still trying to stamp out protests using troops and tanks, despite international sanctions imposed to push him onto a reform path.
Idlib, a northwestern province bordering Turkey, has been a hotbed of protest during the revolt, inspired by uprisings across the Arab world this year, and has also seen increasing attacks by armed insurgents.
The Syrian Observatory said rebels had damaged or destroyed 17 military vehicles in Idlib since Sunday, while in the southern province of Deraa violence continued on Wednesday.
Tanks entered the town of Dael, the British-based group said, leading to clashes in which 15 security force members were killed. Six army defectors and a civilian also died and dozens of civilians were wounded, it said. – (Reuters)