Women & Children Among Hundreds Arrested in Syria

Hundreds of Syrians -- including women and children -- were arrested today in towns and cities throughout the country. Tank occupied a third city, Homs, as a military campaign to crush the seven-week uprising escalated; a 12-year-old was reportedly among those killed. The New York Times reports that armed forces have been going door to door to arrest civilians in the suburbs of Damascus, a dozen cities on Syria's Mediterranean coast and its southern regions.

With foreign journalists barred from reporting on the unrest -- Al-Jazeera journalist Dorothy Parvaz of North Vancouver was detained in late April as she deboarded from her plane at the Damascus airport and has yet to be heard from -- and phone and electricity lines cut in a number of cities, precise details are hard to gather. Syrian's state-run media has almost daily reports of Islamists and the army. From the start of the protests, the regime of President Bashar al-Assad has sought to blame the uprising on foreign insurgents and "armed terrorist groups" operating in Dara'a, Banias and Homs, says the Guardian.

Al-Watan, a private pro-government newspaper, quotes Assad as saying that "the current crisis in Syria will be overcome and that the process of administrative, political and media reforms are continuing." But human rights describe Monday's actions as a "cleanup operation to isolate antigovernment sympathizers and render them incapable of organizing."

Fourteen people were killed in Homs on Sunday. On Monday, security forces surrounded two neighborhood, arrested hundreds and set up checkpoints for those entering and exiting the city:

"They want to finish everything this week," a human rights advocate in Homs said by phone. "No one in the regime has a clear policy. They cannot keep this strategy for a long time. We need political solutions, not more tanks."

Tanks also swept into the southern town of Tafas, which is located near Dara'a.

The Guardian quotes a Jordanian statesman, Adnan Abu Oudeh, about two models that have emerged during the Arab democratic revolution:

"Egypt and Tunisia, where there is an established concept of the state and of the army as an institution of the state ... and the Libyan and Yemeni model.

"Syria belongs to the latter," said Abu Oudeh, who is a board member of the International Crisis Group, an independent conflict resolution group.

An unnamed opposition figure said that, even if Assad were to use "half a million members of Syria's army and other security forces" to quell the revolt, he would still not be able to "crush the growing popular hostility to his rule":

"The shocks of the military campaign are being absorbed," he said. "We have seen that as soon as the army withdraws or lessens its presence in one area to crush people elsewhere, protests erupt in the area the forces had left.

Assad is using Israeli tactics, but will not be able to occupy all of Syria with his loyalists."

The Guardian also reports that, according to western diplomatic sources in Damascus, Iran has been playing a greater and greater role in Syria's crackdown on pro-democracy protesters:

The diplomat pointed to a "significant" increase in the number of Iranian personnel in Syria since protests began in mid-March. Mass arrests in door-to-door raids, similar to those that helped to crush Iran's "green revolution" in 2009, have been stepped up in the past week....

"Tehran has upped the level of technical support and personnel support from the Iranian Republican Guard to strengthen Syria's ability to deal with protesters," the diplomat said, adding that the few hundred personnel were not involved in any physical operations. "Since the start of the uprising, the Iranian regime has been worried about losing its most important ally in the Arab world and important conduit for weapons to Hezbollah [in Lebanon]," the diplomat said....

Activists and diplomats claim Iran's assistance includes help to monitor internet communications such as Skype, widely used by a network of activists, methods of crowd control, and providing equipment such as batons and riot police helmets.

Assad has denied that his regime is receiving any assistance from Iran. His family is from the Shia Muslim minority Alawite sect and is likely to be "nervous about appearing to be helped by its Shia-dominated ally to crush protesters drawn from the 75% Sunni population."

According to human rights activists, over 7000 have been detained in the protests that began on March 18 in Dara'a and more than 800 have died.

Source: http://www.care2.com/causes/politics/blog/women-children-among-hundreds-arrested-in-syria-is-iran-aiding-assad/