Representatives of Syria’s six-month-old protest movement joined opposition parties in Turkey yesterday to forge a united front against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime after violence claimed at least 19 more lives.
Meanwhile, clashes between security forces and deserters killed 11 people in a village in Hama Province on Friday, while another eight died during a crackdown on protests in flashpoint Homs, human rights activists said.
One group, the Local Coordination Committees, put Friday’s death toll as high as 23.
Thousands of protesters had taken to the streets on the Muslim weekly day of prayer, a lightning rod in the protests against Assad in which the UN says 2,700 people have been killed.
The protests were held under the slogan “victory for our Syria and our Yemen.”
In Istanbul, the Syrian National Council (SNC), a group seeking to unite Assad’s opponents, was holding negotiations behind closed doors in Istanbul with rivals yesterday.
Several opposition movements are trying to reach an alliance, council member Khaled Khoja said.
“We have been holding discussions for several days with Burhan Ghalioun, there are also Kurds and representatives of tribes,” he said.
Ghalioun, an academic based in France, was recently designated the leader of a rival opposition grouping, the National Transitional Council, which has Islamist and nationalist supporters.
“When the SNC meets, there will be a new assembly which will be expanded to these new movements,” Khoja said, adding that the meeting scheduled to be held yesterday would now not take place before today at the earliest because of the negotiations.
Elsewhere on the political front, Syrian Ambassador to the US Imad Mustapha was called in to the US Department of State and “read the riot act” about an attempted attack on US Ambassador Robert Ford.
A mob of nearly 100 Syrians chanting hostile slogans tried to storm an office in Damascus, where Ford had arrived to meet opposition figure Hassan Abdelazim on Thursday.
Mustapha “was reminded that Ambassador Ford is the personal representative of the president [Barack Obama] and an attack on Ford is an attack on the United States,” US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters.
The UN Security Council remained divided over whether to threaten Assad’s regime with sanctions over its deadly crackdown on dissent.
European nations on Friday dropped the word “sanctions” from a proposed resolution on Syria in a bid to temper Russian opposition.
France, Britain, Germany and Portugal instead called for “targeted measures” in their draft text.
Russia and China have threatened to veto any resolution calling for punitive measures against Damascus.
On the ground, activists said those killed in Homs were shot dead by security forces, while about 250 tanks and armored vehicles entered Rastan, a major city in the province and the scene of intense operations against army defectors.
A Syrian rights group said government troops had retaken most of a rebellious central town after five days of intense fighting with army defectors who sided with protesters.
Rami Abdul-Raham, head of the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said the troops spread out across Rastan after defectors pulled out from the town.
Land and cellular telephones were cut in Rastan, making it impossible to get information from residents.
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