More than 60 killed in protests

April 30, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

McClatchy Newspapers

CAIRO

Defying tanks, troops and gunfire, thousands of people took to the streets Friday across Syria to protest the regime’s bloody crackdown on a 6-week-old uprising and press a demand for the ouster of President Bashar Assad, according to witnesses, activists and news reports.

More than 60 people were killed, according to human-rights activists; about half of them were gunned down as they tried to breach a blockade by tank-backed soldiers in Daraa, the southern city where the gravest challenge to more than four decades of Assad family dictatorship began.

“There’s a difference between Daraa and everywhere else,” said Haitham al Maleh, an 80-year-old dissident, reached by telephone in Damascus, which has banned most foreign journalists.

In the first concrete international response to the crackdown, the Obama administration announced sanctions against three top Syrian security officials, including Assad’s brother, as well as the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, accused by the White House of advising the regime on crowd suppression.

The sanctions freeze any U.S. assets belonging to the targets and prohibit Americans from doing business with them. Because they aren’t believed to have any U.S. assets, the measures are mostly symbolic, although they carry political weight that would bolster sanctions that are being considered by the European allies.

The administration has been criticized for failing to respond to the uprising in Syria — where more than 450 people reportedly have been killed and four times that number injured — with the same alacrity as it did to the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.