AMMAN: Hundreds of women from a Syrian town that has witnessed mass arrests of its men marched along Syria's main coastal highway on Wednesday to demand their release, human rights activists said. Security forces, including secret police, stormed Baida on Tuesday, going into houses and arresting men aged up to 60, the activists said, after townsfolk joined unprecedented protests challenging the 11-year rule of President Bashar Al-Assad. The women from Baida were marching on the main highway leading to Turkey chanting slogans to demand the release of some 350 men who have been arrested, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. “The women of Baida are on the highway. They want their men back,” the organization said. Women demonstrated in support in the nearby Mediterranean city of Banias, it said. A human rights lawyer earlier said security forces had arrested 200 residents in Baida, killing two people. “They brought in a television crew and forced the men they arrested to shout ‘We sacrifice our blood and our soul for you, Bashar' while filming them,” the lawyer, who was in contact with residents of the town, told Reuters. “Syria is the Arab police state par excellence. But the regime still watches international reaction, and as soon as it senses that it has weakened, it turns more bloody,” said the lawyer, who did not want to be further identified. Assad, who tried to position Syria as self-declared champion, of “resistance” to Israel while seeking peace with the Jewish state and accepting offers for rehabilitation in the West, has responded to the protests, now in their fourth week, with a blend of force and vague promises of reform. The Damascus Declaration, Syria's main rights group, said the death toll from the pro-democracy protests had reached 200. The authorities have described the protests as part of a foreign conspiracy to sow sectarian strife, blaming unspecified armed groups and “infiltrators” for the violence, and denying a report by Human Rights Watch that security forces have prevented ambulances and medical supplies from reaching besieged areas.
