Syrian troops kill eight at protests

SYRIAN security forces opened fire on protesters in several parts of the country yesterday, killing at least eight people and wounding scores, while masked gunmen burst into an apartment in the predominantly Kurdish north-east and shot dead one of Syria’s most prominent opposition figures.

The slaying of Mashaal Tammo, a 53-year-old former political prisoner and a spokesman for the Kurdish Future Party, was the latest in a string of targeted killings in Syria as the country slides further into disorder, seven months into the uprising against President Bashar Assad.

Tammo, killed in the city of Qamishli, was also a member of the executive committee of the newly formed Syrian National Council, a broad-based front bringing together opposition figures in an attempt to unify the fragmented dissident movement.

Tammo’s son and another member of the Kurdish Future Party were wounded in the attack, said Omar Idilbi, a spokesman for an activist group called the Local Co-ordination Committees.

Qamishli erupted in protests as thousands of people took to the streets and swarmed the hospital where Tammo was taken, many of them shouting “Azadi,” the Kurdish word for freedom.

Tammo, a vocal regime opponent, had been instrumental in organising anti-government protests in Qamishli.

“The regime is responsible for this killing,” Osso said. “Mashaal had no enemies, his only crime was that he was a political activist and a supporter of the revolution,” he added.

The killing could spark violent protests in the Kurdish region at a time when Syria’s security forces already have their hands full in trying to stamp out dissent across much of the rest of the country. Kurds — the largest ethnic minority in Syria — make up 15% of the country’s 23 million people and have long complained of neglect and discrimination.

Several academics and physicists have also been shot dead by gunmen in the past month, most of them in the country’s restive central and northern regions.

In what has become a weekly ritual of protests and violence, security forces opened fire at Friday rallies by tens of thousands of marchers in the streets of several Syrian cities, towns and villages. At least eight people were killed and scores were wounded, according to various activists.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least four people were killed and 25 were wounded in the central city of Homs, Syria’s third largest city.

In Douma, the Observatory said at least three people were killed and several were wounded.

One person was killed in the town of Zabadani near the border with Lebanon.

Since mid-March, the Syrian government crackdown has left at least 2,900 people dead.