BEIRUT -- Gathering confidence after flushing rebels from strongholds in the north, the Syrian government on Wednesday launched its biggest raid in months on the southern city of Daraa, where the uprising against President Bashar Assad began a year ago, opposition activists said.
The activists feared that the government was emboldened after having seized most of the northern city of Idlib on Tuesday, amid faltering international efforts to stop the violence, and had turned its attention to crushing centers of the rebellion in the south as the symbolically important one-year mark of the uprising approached.
Today is the anniversary of protests in Daraa that followed the killing of schoolchildren who had scrawled anti-government graffiti. Those demonstrations turned what had been sporadic protests into a nationwide uprising that has become the most deadly of the Arab revolts.
There have been regular clashes in Daraa, but "today the situation is different," with about 150 tanks and many busloads of security forces sweeping the city from the west, said anti-government activist Anwar Fares, reached by phone in the city. "It is the most violent military raid on Daraa since April 25," he said.
"It seems they want to have a situation similar to Idlib and Homs," Mr. Fares added, referring to cities where the government forced armed rebels from their strongholds. But unlike those cities, Daraa lacks a strong presence of the Free Syrian Army, the main armed opposition group made up of defecting soldiers and other fighters. Rebels have not held entire neighborhoods in Daraa, as they did in the north.
Mr. Fares lamented that Mr. Assad seemed to feel that he has a freer hand in recent weeks. "He is taking his sweet time," he said.
Activists said the Syrian army's tanks and artillery units also shelled some areas in and around the cities of Idlib and Homs on Wednesday, the second day of heavy barrages, suggesting that pockets of anti-government resistance remained entrenched in those areas despite government claims of total control.
At least 30 people were killed in the Idlib shelling alone, according to activist statements and interviews. Syria's restriction on foreign news coverage of the conflict made it impossible to independently corroborate their accounts.
The latest military moves came as Amnesty International claimed in a new report that Syrians detained in the crackdown, which the United Nations says has claimed some 7,500 lives, had been "thrust into a nightmarish world of systemic torture," the scale of which had not been witnessed for decades.
The report, made public Wednesday, documented 31 methods of torture, described by witnesses or victims to Amnesty International researchers in Jordan in February, the report said. The descriptions "indicate that detainees are at most risk when being interrogated," some of them forced into vehicle tires and others manacled and suspended so that only the tips of the toes touch the floor.
Ann Harrison, an Amnesty International official, said "a system of detention and interrogation" seemed "intended primarily to degrade, humiliate and terrify its victims into silence."
First Published: March 15, 2012, 4:00 a.m.
