Security forces shot dead a woman and beat up Syria’s best-known political cartoonist yesterday, a day after violence in which 11 civilians and eight soldiers were killed, activists said.
The woman was shot dead during a military operation in a village near the eastern oil hub of Deir Ezzor, 460 kilometres northeast of Damascus, said the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Activists also said masked security forces personnel and pro-regime shabiha militiamen grabbed cartoonist Ali Ferzat at the capital’s Ummayad square while he was returning home by car at 4.30 a.m.
“The attackers stole the contents of his briefcase, including his drawings and other personal belongings,” said the Local Coordination Committees (LCC), which groups activists on the ground.
“He was beaten hard, notably on his hands. Passers-by found him on the road to the airport and he was taken to hospital,” the LCC’s Omar Idlbi said in a statement.
Since the start of an anti-regime uprising in March, Mr Ferzat, one of the Arab world’s most renowned cartoonists, has published cartoons critical of the brutal crackdown on protesters.
“The Syrian security forces are fully responsible for what happens to Ali Ferzat, especially as he had recently undergone a spinal operation,” Mr Idlbi added.
The Observatory said “an armed gang kidnapped and assaulted Ali Ferzat. He has bruises on the face and hands. They (the gunmen) then threw him out of a car on the road to the airport.”
A friend who visited Mr Ferzat in hospital said that two fingers of his left hand were broken, his right arm was fractured, the left eye badly bruised and blood oozed from his chest.
On Wednesday, 11 people were killed, according to the Observatory: seven in Homs province, two in Deir Ezzor, one in Idlib and one in Damascus, where security forces opened fire at Midane square on youths offering condolences to a young man who died under torture.
The same day, eight Syrian soldiers were killed in two attacks in Homs province of central Syria, the official Sana news agency reported.
An officer and two soldiers were killed in an attack on a military bus in the town of Talbisa, and five military men died in an attack on their vehicle at Al-Rastan, further north, it said.
The Syrian government has not given a total for the number of security forces killed in the regime’s crackdown on anti-regime protests which began in March, but activists and human rights groups say about 400 have died.
More than 2,200 people, mostly civilians, have been killed over the past five months in the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, the United Nations says.
Also in Talbisa, several people were injured when security forces stopped them from trying to approach members of a visiting UN humanitarian mission, the Observatory said.
The people wanted to give accounts to the delegation, which arrived over the weekend and was to complete its mission yesterday, of “the violence of the regime,” the group said.
Iran, a key ally, called on Wednesday for dialogue between Damascus and the opposition.
“The people and government of Syria must come together to reach an understanding,” Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in an interview with a Lebanese television channel.
Visa credit cards issued in Syria, by Syrian banks or those with branches in the country, stopped working from Wednesday, bank officials and users said.
Ali Ismail, manager of the import-export company Medsea, linked the move to US and other Western sanctions imposed on the Syrian regime over its deadly crackdown of anti-government dissent.