The US said on Monday it had pulled its ambassador out of Syria because of threats to his safety, prompting Syria to follow suit in a deterioration of ties already battered over Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s crackdown against protesters.
US Ambassador Robert Ford had antagonized Syria’s government with his high-profile support for the demonstrators trying to end 41 years of Assad family rule. Assad supporters attacked the US embassy and Ford’s convoy in recent months.
Ford left Syria as a government crackdown on protests and a nascent armed insurgency intensified and as more businesses and shops closed in southern Syria in the most sustained strike of the seven-month uprising.
In the central city of Homs, 140km north of Damascus, eight people were killed when troops and militiamen fired at majority Sunni Muslim districts that have been a bastion for protests and, lately, a refuge for military defectors leading armed resistance, residents said.
The US Department of State issued a statement saying Ford “was brought back to Washington as a result of credible threats against his personal safety in Syria.”
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Ford was expected to return to Syria and demanded the Syrian government provide for his protection and end what she called a “smear campaign of malicious and deceitful propaganda” against him.
Nuland said Ford had not been “withdrawn” — a diplomatically loaded term that could have implied that the envoy would not return and that suggests a -diminution in relations between the two countries.
At the end of last month, Assad loyalists threw concrete blocks at Ford’s convoy and hit the cars with iron bars as he was visiting centrist politician Hassan Abdulazim, according to an account published by the ambassador the next day.
In July several Assad loyalists broke into the embassy in Damascus, tore down signs and tried to break security glass.
After news of Ford’s pullout broke, a spokeswoman for the Syrian embassy in Washington, Roua Sharbaji, said Syrian Ambassador Imad Moustapha had been recalled to Damascus for consultations.
Meanwhile, Amnesty International says patients in state hospitals are subjected to torture and mistreatment as part of the government’s crackdown on dissent, while medics are also being targeted.
“The Syrian government has turned hospitals into instruments of repression in its efforts to crush opposition,” London-based Amnesty said in a 39-page report released late on Monday.
The report documented how wounded patients in at least four government-run hospitals had been subjected to torture and other ill-treatment, both by medical workers and security personnel.
And “hospital workers suspected of treating protesters and others injured in unrest-related incidents have themselves faced arrest and torture,” it said, leaving them in a dilemma.
A crackdown on anti-regime protests in Syria since mid-March has left more than 3,000 dead, according to the UN.
Radwan Ziadeh, cofounder of the Damascus Centre for Human Rights, told a media conference at the UN headquarters in New York that nobody knew the exact figure for the number of detainees.
However, based on reports of activists working underground in Syria, “we have an estimate number that more than 30,000 have been detained.”
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