Syria’s government threatened Saturday to take firmer measures to rein in protests challenging President Bashar al-Assad’s rule, even as new clashes broke out during funeral services for some of those killed in demonstrations Friday.
Human rights groups and residents in Syria said that at least 37 people have been killed since the latest round of violence began with protests after midday prayers Friday in the capital, Damascus, and the cities of Daraa, Homs, Harasta, Latakia, Baniyas and Tartous.
“We are dying,” said Razon Zaitonah, a human rights lawyer who is in hiding in Damascus.
Citing reports from contacts across the country whom she had reached by phone, Zaitonah said security forces had fired on marchers attending funerals of slain demonstrators in Homs and in Daraa, the southwestern city where Syria’s almost month-long uprising began.
All Internet connections to Daraa had been severed, she added, so activists could communicate only by cellphone.
In a stern statement issued Saturday, the Interior Ministry suggested that authorities are prepared to crack down harder on the protests challenging the Assad dynasty’s four-decade-long grip on the country.
The statement, carried by the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency, said there was “no more room for leniency or tolerance” toward disorder.
But the statement also sounded a note of frustration that previous gestures by the government had failed to pacify opponents. In recent days, Assad has dissolved the cabinet, repealed laws denying citizenship to ethnic Kurds and promised to ease restrictions on civil liberties.
The ministry blamed the continuing unrest on unidentified foreign plotters, outside satellite news channels and “spiteful individuals.”
Muntaha al-Atrash, 70, of Damascus, said her relatives in Harasta, outside the capital, told her that two people had been killed and 12 injured in clashes with security forces there Friday. She said she had been told that police were plucking wounded demonstrators from hospitals and detaining them.
Atrash said contacts in Daraa had told her that security forces had killed injured victims “in cold blood.”
“Even the Israelis didn’t do that in our wars,” she said.
Atrash, who said her father was Sultan al-Atrash, the leader of the Syrian revolt against France in 1925, praised the demonstrations and predicted that Assad would go, like other authoritarian leaders in the region. “It’s a matter of time,” she said.
President Obama issued a statement Friday condemning the violence in strong terms and calling on the Assad government to heed Syrians’ demands for a more responsive and open government. The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, also condemned the violence and urged the government to respond to calls for reform.
kunklef@washpost.com
**Tabei is a special correspondent. Special correspondent Muhammad Mansour contributed to this report.
