Four die in Syrian military clashes

Clashes between Syrian troops and army defectors in the country’s north west killed four people today, while gunmen shot dead a political activist in the latest in a wave of targeted killings in a rebellious central city, activists said.

The violence, which stretched from the north of the country to the south, demonstrated the increasingly militarised nature of the uprising and heightened fears that Syria may be sliding toward civil war more than six months since the revolt against President Bashar Assad’s regime began.

The worst of the fighting today was in the Jabal al-Zawiya region in north-west Syria, where clashes have taken place for months.

The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said three soldiers and one civilian were killed in fighting there between government troops and army defectors.

In the south, defectors also attacked an army checkpoint in the village of Dael, wounding one officer, according to the Local Coordination Committees, an activist network.

Syria-based rights activist Mustafa Osso said government troops were also conducting military operations in the town of Talbiseh in central Syria. Talbiseh is near the town of Rastan, which army troops backed by tanks retook last week after five days of heavy fighting with defectors.

Syria’s six-month opposition movement has focused on peaceful demonstrations, although recently there have been reports of protesters taking up arms to defend themselves against military attacks.

Assad’s crackdown has killed 2,700 people since mid-March, according to a UN estimate.

The observatory said gunmen killed Communist activist Mustafa Ahmad, 52, in Homs late on Monday. The killing came a day after gunmen killed the son of Syria’s state-appointed cleric, Grand Mufti Ahmad Badreddine Hassoun.

Ahmad’s killing was the latest in a series of targeted killings of prominent people, including a nuclear engineer, university professors and physicians. The men, a mix of Alawites, Christians and Shiites, were all killed in a hail of bullets in the past week, most of them in central Homs province – one of the hotbeds of anti-government protests.

The regime has accused “terrorist gunmen” of the killings, while the opposition accused the regime of trying to foment sectarian strife to maintain its grip on power.

Syria’s volatile sectarian divide means an armed conflict could rapidly escalate in scale and brutality. The Assad regime is dominated by the Alawite minority, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, but the country is overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim. Alawite dominance has bred resentment which Assad has worked to damp down by pushing a strictly secular identity for the state.

Assad has exploited fears of a civil war fears by portraying himself as the only power who can keep the peace.

Besides the toll in human life, Syria’s turmoil has battered its economy. The tourism industry, one of the main earners of hard currency, has been decimated.

The United States and the European Union have imposed several rounds of sanctions against Assad and his regime, including a ban on the import of Syrian oil. Most of Syria’s oil exports had gone to Europe. Now, Damascus is forced to look for buyers in the east.

In an attempt to preserve foreign currency reserves that stand at more than 17 billion US dollars, the government banned the importation of luxury items and manufactured goods such as cars two weeks ago. It targeted goods with a customs duty of more than 5%.

On Tuesday, the government reversed the ban after it led to a spike in local prices, the state-run SANA news agency said.