Syrian forces killed 41 civilians in an effort to crush pro-democracy protests, a human rights lawyer said on Wednesday, as opposition leaders met in Turkey to plot the downfall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Lawyer Razan Zaitouna said by telephone from Damascus the 41 dead in Rastan included a four-year-old girl killed as government forces shelled the central town on Tuesday.
Five of them were buried in Rastan on Wednesday, she said.
Syrian forces also killed nine civilians on Tuesday in the town of Hirak, rights campaigner Ammar Qurabi said on Wednesday.
The nine, among them three doctors, one dentist and an 11-year-old girl, were killed by snipers and during the storming of houses in Hirak, where tanks had deployed this week, said Qurabi, who heads the Syrian Human Rights Organization.
Rights groups say 1,000 civilians have been killed as Assad seeks to crush a revolt that has turned into the gravest challenge to his 11-year rule. The severity of the crackdown has provoked international condemnation and sanctions.
“The revolution inside Syria has declared: ‘The people want the overthrow of the regime.’ We echo it. The price of the blood being shed can only be freedom,” Abdelrazzaq Eid, a senior figure in the Damascus Declaration umbrella opposition group, told a conference in the Turkish coastal city of Antalya.
The gathering is the first official meeting of activists and opposition figures in exile since protests erupted 10 weeks ago in Daraa, a poor, agricultural city in southern Syria.
“The dictatorship has presented nothing to show a modicum of good intentions. It has lost any legitimacy by firing at and killing its own people,” Eid said, to the applause of delegates.
Syrian authorities blame armed groups, backed by Islamists and foreign agitators, for the unrest and say more than 120 police and soldiers have been killed.
Delegates in Turkey said an ultra-loyalist army controlled by Assad’s brother Maher, and a security apparatus which has suppressed dissent for decades, were preventing Damascus and Syria’s biggest city, Aleppo, from joining the demonstrations.
However, they said international pressure and a series of gruesome killings have turned Syrian public opinion against the 45-year-old leader, pointing to a slow but steady expansion of demonstrations, despite an intensified military crackdown.
Thirteen-year-old Hamza al-Khatib has become a potent symbol to protesters after video of his bloodied corpse was posted on the Internet. Activists say he was tortured and killed by security forces. Syrian authorities deny he was tortured and say he was killed when armed gangs shot at government forces.
US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said she was “very concerned” about al-Khatib’s case.
“I think what that symbolizes for many Syrians is the total collapse of any effort by the Syrian government to work with and listen to their own people,” Clinton told a news conference. “I can only hope that this child did not die in vain.”
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