DAMASCUS: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad sacked the governor of Hama on Saturday, a day after half a million rallied against the regime in the hotbed city, an as activists said the crackdown on dissent claimed 28 new lives.
Anti-regime dissent billowed on Friday in response to a call by a Facebook group for massive protests to demand the ouster of Assad and his autocratic regime.
In Hama alone there were 500,000 people on the streets, activists said, calling it the single largest demonstration of its kind since the pro-democracy movement erupted on March 15.
Assad reacted to the affront by sacking the governor of Hama, a city with a bloody past where an estimated 20,000 people were killed in 1982 when the army put down an Islamist revolt against the rule of his late father, Hafez al-Assad.
“The Syrian president signed a decree today relieving Doctor Ahmad Khaled Abdel Aziz of his post as governor of Hama,” said a news flash on state television.
Most of Friday's victims were killed in Idlib province, where troops backed by tanks have swept through villages all week to crush dissent.
“Sixteen people were killed” in Idlib on Friday, Ammar Qorabi, the head of the National Organisation for Human Rights, said on Saturday.
Three of them were women who died when the army shelled a chicken hatchery in the village of Al-Bara, Qorabi said.
Another 10 people were killed when security forces opened fire to disperse protests in several cities, including eight in the central protest hub of Homs and two in the Damascus neighbourhood of Qadam.
One person was reported killed in Syria's second-largest city Aleppo and another in the Mediterranean coastal city of Latakia.
A previous death toll provided by activists late Friday gave a figure of 11 civilians dead, including a 50-year-old woman and her 20-year-old daughter in Al-Bara.
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