AMMAN: Syrian security forces swept into the coastal city of Banias on Tuesday, a protest leader said, taking control of another urban centre from demonstrators challenging the authoritarian rule of President Bashar Al-Assad. “They moved into the main market area. The army has sealed the northern entrance and security forces (sealed) the south,” Anas Al-Shughri told Reuters. “They armed Alawite villages in the hills overlooking Banias and we are now facing militias from the east,” he said. Al-Assad, is pursuing a violent crackdown on six weeks of protests which began with demands for greater freedoms and now seek his overthrow. Activists said arrests continued across Syria Tuesday. Speaking from Egypt, Ammar Qurabi, head of the National Organization of Human Rights in Syria, said the latest wave of detentions had snared more than 1,000 people. International condemnation of the crackdown has intensified since the Deraa assault, which revived memories of the 1982 repression of an armed Islamist uprising in the city of Hama by Al-Assad's father, President Hafez Al-Assad. “Syria should not go through another massacre like Hama. We have reminded them of this,” Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, who has sent envoys to Damascus and spoken to Assad several times during the unrest, told Turkey's A-TV channel. French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said the European Union should impose sanctions on Syrian leaders including Assad in response to the violent suppression of pro-democracy protests. Germany also repeated a call for EU sanctions. “The Syrian government's continuing brutal actions leave the European Union no choice but to press firmly ahead with targeted sanctions against the regime,” Deputy Foreign Minister Werner Hoyer said. Israel, which has relied on Assad and his father to keep their front line quiet for nearly four decades – despite Israel's occupation of the Golan Heights and Syria's support for militants opposed to Israel – said Assad was losing his grip. “I believe Assad is approaching the moment in which he will lose his authority. The growing brutality is pushing him into a corner, the more people are killed, the less chance Assad has to come out of it,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak said. The International Crisis Group said the situation in Syria “is quickly going beyond the point of no return”. “By denouncing all forms of protest as sedition, and dealing with them through escalating violence, the regime is closing the door on any possible honorable exit to a deepening national crisis,” the crisis resolution group said. In Banias, a Mediterranean coast city that has witnessed some of the most persistent protests, Shughri said armed plainclothes security men had deployed in the market street and were making arrests.
