Dubai: More than 80 people were reported killed across Syria yesterday, 52 of them civilians, as regime forces pressed ahead with a crackdown on protests three days ahead of a ceasefire deadline and pullback.
Monitors reported the latest deaths despite UN chief Ban Ki-moon's latest rebuke to Damascus for stepping up its assault on dissent hubs ahead of Tuesday's deadline.
Forty civilians died "in bombardment and shooting on the town of Latamna", said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The Britain-based monitoring group said other civilians were killed in Tibet Al Imam, also in Hama, as well as in the neighbouring province of Homs, where Rastan town was bombed, in Idlib to the northwest and Aleppo in northern Syria.
Sixteen rebels and 12 regime fighters were also killed nationwide, it said, adding that 13 bodies were found in Deir Balaa district of Homs and 10 others extracted from the rubble in Hreitan, Aleppo province.
Baath anniversary
The Observatory said the deaths came after President Bashar Al Assad's forces launched an overnight assault on Latamna and clashed with members of the rebel Free Syrian Army.
UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan has warned of ‘alarming' casualties as the Syrian government's year-long crackdown on dissent — which the United Nations says has killed more than 9,000 people — showed no signs of abating. Monitors put the number of dead at more than 10,000.
Meanwhile, thousands of people demonstrated in Damascus yesterday in support of the ruling Baath party on the 65th anniversary of its creation, an AFP journalist said.
The official Sana news agency reported similar demonstrations in other cities that "expressed the Syrian people, army and leadership's steadfastness in the face of the conspiracy hatched against Syria".
