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DAMASCUS: Syrian students rallied in Damascus on Monday to express solidarity with protesters killed over the weekend, as the army moved in on the flashpoint town of Banias.
France and Germany, meanwhile, slammed the deadly assaults by security forces on anti-regime protesters and called on President Bashar al-Assad to make good on his reform pledges.
“Students rallied in solidarity with the victims of Daraa and Banias, chanting 'We will sacrifice our soul and blood for you martyrs',” a rights activist told AFP Monday.
He was referring to the southern town of Daraa, a protest hub where rights groups say 26 people were killed on Friday, and the northern coastal town of Banias, where a bloody weekend crackdown left four civilians dead, witnesses said.
A YouTube video of the Damascus rally showed students chanting “Allah, Freedom and Syria, only!”, a recurring slogan of anti-regime protests.
They also chanted “One, one one... the Syrian people are one!”, in an apparent bid to exorcise the ghost of sectarian strife raised by authorities as the protests toll rises.
Abdel-Karim Rihawi, president of the Syrian League for the Defence of Human Rights, told AFP some demonstrators chanted pro-regime slogans.
“Security forces intervened and made arrests,” he said.
Political unrest erupted in Syria in mid-March, but anti-government demonstrations, challenging Assad to introduce major reforms, have been largely confined to the provinces.
Student demonstrations in Syria are rare, although young people have played a key role in popular uprisings elsewhere across the region.
Troops surrounded Banias with up to 30 tanks on Monday as residents buried their dead and the town's electricity supply was cut off, witnesses, activists and residents told AFP.
“The army is shooting sporadically to provoke people, but not a single demonstrator has fired,” an activist said, adding that calls were made from mosque minarets urging the army to hold fire.
The rights activist said three soldiers had tried to defect and join the demonstrators after refusing to fire at them, but officers opened fire on them, wounding the soldiers.
“Bashar al-Assad is sending us a message: punish those who dare demand freedom with death,” a university professor told AFP by telephone.
Government forces on Sunday killed at least four civilians and wounded 17 when they strafed a residential area of Banias with gunfire for hours, witnesses said.
Nine soldiers, including two officers, were later killed and several wounded when their patrol was ambushed outside the town, the official SANA news agency said.
Anas al-Shuhri, a leaders of the protest movement, said three civilians were “killed by sniper fire” and blamed “regime henchmen” for the violence.
