400 civilians killed in Syria revolt

Amman: Syrian security forces have shot dead at least 400 civilians in their campaign to crush the country's month-long peaceful pro-democracy revolution, the Syrian human rights organisation Sawasiah said on Tuesday.

Separately, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said security police arrested prominent rights campaigner Qassem Al Ghazzawi on Tuesday in his home city of Deir Al Zor in Syria's impoverished east after protests intensified in the region last week.

In Focus: Unrest in Middle East

Another prominent Syrian dissident was on Tuesday referred to a military court for ownership of a satellite phone, a Syrian human rights leader said.

The authorities also arrested more than 40 people in raids Monday and Tuesday in several parts of the country, which has been gripped by six weeks of anti-regime dissent, said Rami Abdul Rahman.

Eleven other people arrested during the unprecedented pro-democracy protests that erupted in mid-March were meanwhile freed on Tuesday, said the head of the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

"Opposition figure and activist Mahmud Essa will be tried by a military court for owning a Thuraya [satellite] phone and a high-tech computer," Abdul Rahman told AFP.

Essa was arrested on April 19 after giving an interview to the pan-Arab television channel Al Jazeera on the situation in Syria, hours after authorities announced plans to lift nearly five decades of draconian emergency rule.

On Tuesday, gunfire reverberated in the southern Syrian city of Daraa where the dead still lay unclaimed in the streets a day after a brutal government crackdown of the popular revolt against President Bashar Al Assad, residents said.

The Syrian army, backed by tanks and snipers, launched a deadly raid before dawn Monday on Daraa, where the uprising in Syria started more than a month ago. At least 11 people were killed in the southern city.

The White House has stepped up its condemnation of Al Assad's regime, but stopped well short of demanding his ouster.

US officials said Washington has begun drawing up targeted sanctions against him, his family and his inner circle to boost pressure on them to halt the repression. Washington also was conferring with European countries and the United Nations about options.

The United States told all its nonessential staff and the families of all its embassy workers to leave the country, but kept the facility open for limited services. It also advised all Americans to defer travel to Syria and advised those already in the country to leave.

'Children are being killed'

A Daraa resident told The Associated Press on Tuesday "dead bodies were still in the streets because no one has been able to remove them".

"We are being subjected to a massacre," the man screamed over the telephone as gunfire crackled in the background. "Children are being killed. We have been without electricity for three days. We have no water."

The man said Syrian special forces were in the streets of the impoverished city near the border with Jordan. Tanks had opened fire in the city, he added.

The witness, contacted via a Jordanian cellphone, spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.

Syria has banned nearly all foreign media and restricted access to trouble spots since the uprising began, making it almost impossible to verify the dramatic events shaking one of the most authoritarian, anti-Western regimes in the Arab world.

Daraa, located in a parched region of 300,000 people in the south, has seen some of the worst bloodshed in the past five weeks as the uprising gained momentum. Recently, the city has absorbed many rural migrants who can no longer farm after years of drought.

The uprising was touched off by the arrest of teenagers who scrawled anti-government graffiti on a wall.

The attack on Daraa was by far the biggest in scope and firepower. Video purportedly shot by activists showed tanks rolling through streets and grassy fields with soldiers on foot jogging behind them.

State-run television quoted a military source as saying army units entered the city to bring security "answering the pleas for help by residents of Daraa".

Flashpoint

Syria has a pivotal role in most of the flashpoint issues of the Middle East - from the Arab-Israeli peace process to Iran's widening influence.

Instability has thrown into disarray the US push for engagement with Damascus, part of Washington's hopes to peel the country away from Hamas, Hezbollah and Tehran.

No intervention: Sarkozy

A UN Security Council resolution would be required for any foreign intervention in Syria, President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Tuesday, as Italy and France called for an end the "violent repression".

"There is no question of doing anything there without a Security Council resolution," Sarkozy said at joint news conference with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi after a summit in Rome between the two men.

"The situation is unacceptable... You cannot send in tanks and the army to put down protests. This brutality is unacceptable," he said. "We are with the Arab people in their aspirations for freedom," he said.