BEIRUT – For a few hours Tuesday, it looked like Syria might be starting to ease a violent crackdown on dissent that has turned parts of the country’s third-largest city into a virtual war zone.
Some tanks started pulling out of residential neighborhoods and huge crowds took to the streets of Homs shouting their opposition to the government of President Bashar Assad, opposition activists said.
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But the activists charge that it was just a temporary ruse to mislead observers from the Arab League, who got their first look Tuesday at the city that has been at the center of a nine-month uprising.
At least some of the tanks, they said, were moved into government and school compounds, where they would be temporarily out of sight.
And before many of the marchers could reach the central square where they planned to stage a sit-in, security forces fired tear gas and live bullets into the crowd massing there and in a nearby neighborhood, witnesses and activists said.
Syrian security forces killed as many as 45 people Tuesday, including 19 in the Homs region, according to the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The Local Coordination Committees, another opposition group, put the day’s toll at 35 with 14 killed in Homs.
“The regime doesn’t care about the observers or public opinion,” said an activist reached in Homs who asked not to be identified to avoid retaliation. “The tanks are still in the streets. Maybe the only thing that has changed is that they are in the side streets, not main streets.”
Amateur video released by activists showed forces firing on protesters even while the monitors were inside the city. One of the observers walked with an elderly man who pointed with his cane to a fresh pool of blood on the street that he said had been shed by his son, killed a day earlier.
The man, wearing a red-and-white checkered headdress, then called for the monitor to walk ahead to “see the blood of my second son,” also killed in the onslaught.
“Where is justice? Where are the Arabs?” the old man shouted in pain.
Syria has barred most foreign journalists, and the opposition claims could not be independently verified. There was no immediate comment from the government.
Tuesday marked the official start of an Arab League mission to determine whether the government is upholding a promise to end the crackdown, part of a league-negotiated plan to end months of bloodshed that Syria’s neighbors fear could push the country into a civil war. More than 5,000 people have been killed since the start of major anti-government protests in March, according to United Nations estimates.
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