(Washington Post) Tara Bahrampour - The Syrian government Tuesday fired live ammunition into a crowd of protesters even as it lifted decades-old emergency laws in an attempt to appease its critics. In Homs, four people were killed after tens of thousands of demonstrators tried to stage an Egyptian-style sit-in in a main square, activists said. After firing warning shots into the air, security forces fired into the crowd and dispersed it, using tanks to secure the area. "What happened in Homs was really scary for the regime. It shows that the main urban Sunni population is starting to come out," said Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oklahoma.
2011-04-20 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive