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Activists describe massacre in central city of Hama after armoured units break through barricades to crush protests Syria’s uprising faced one of its defining moments when President Bashar al-Assad followed in his father’s footsteps and sent in tanks to crush protests in the central city of Hama, killing up to 100 people and triggering a new wave of international outrage. The National Organisation for Human Rights said in total 136 people had been killed in Hama and three other towns. Activists described a massacre after armoured units ended a month-long siege to smash through makeshift barricades around the city just after dawn on the eve of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. International media are still largely banned from Syria but citizen journalists ensured that the scale and brutality of the crackdown was visible to the outside world. Video clips posed on YouTube showed unarmed civilians taking cover from shelling and heavy machinegun fire as hospitals struggled to cope with 200 casualties by mid-morning . Bodies lay scattered on the streets, residents reported. “They started shooting with heavy machine guns at civilians, at the young men protecting the barricades,” Omar Halabi, a local activist, told the Guardian. Syria, with a population of 23 million, is experiencing the bloodiest days yet of the Arab spring, which began with the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. Assad, once hailed as a modernising reformist, has ruled since 2000. The government said “armed gangs” with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades were vandalising public and private property in Hama, attacking police stations, erecting barricades and burning tyres. Hama, known as a conservative stronghold of the country’s Sunni Muslim majority, has a special resonance in Syria as the scene of a notorious massacre in 1982 when the Ba’ath regime crushed an Islamist uprising that challenged the rule of the president’s father, Hafez. At least 10,000 were killed then. Sunday’s crackdown involved troops and security agents accompanied by busloads of irregular militiamen known as Shabiha (Ghosts) who belong to the same Alawite minority as the Assad family. The official Sana news agency said two security force personnel were killed in Hama and three during unrest in Deir Ezzor, on the eastern border with Iraq, where government armoured units continued an assault over the weekend. Violence was also reported from Deraa in the south and in parts of Damascus. Hama residents told Reuters that army snipers had climbed on to the roofs of the state-owned electricity company and the main prison, while tank shells were falling at the rate of four a minute in and around the north of the city. Electricity and water supplies to the main neighbourhoods had been cut, a tactic used regularly by the Syrian military when storming towns to crush protests. Halabi described people walking towards tanks armed only with wooden bats, steel bars or stones. “It’s a massacre. They want to break Hama before the month of Ramadan,” an eyewitness who identified himself as Ahmed, told the Associated Press by telephone. Al-Arabiya TV reported that some soldiers had refused to fire on protesters and had joined them. But unlike Libya, Syria has not yet experienced any high-level defections from the military. Film clips showed bloodied corpses in hospital mortuaries, clouds of smoke, the sound of explosions and gunfire, and demonstrators chanting “Allahu Akbar” (God is great). Britain condemned the “appalling” onslaught, long anticipated by the Syrian opposition. “Such action against civilians who have been protesting peacefully in large numbers in the city for a number of weeks has no justification,” said William Hague, the foreign secretary. Speaking to the BBC from Damascus, a spokesman for the US embassy described “full-on warfare by the Syrian government on its own people … That’s the armed gang that is striking terror into the hearts of the people”. The US ambassador has been told he cannot leave the city after enraging the government by paying a high-profile visit to Hama last month. President Barack Obama said he was “appalled” by the brutality of the Syrian government and described reports from Hama as “horrifying”. Precise casualty figures were unclear but they rose throughout the day. The local co-ordination committee, which organises and monitors anti-government protests, said it had the names of 49 civilians who had died in the onslaught on Hama. By nightfall the numbers were nudging 100 for Hama alone. Hama has been a focus of anti-regime protests since early June, when security forces shot dead at least 70 people. Since then it has fallen out of government control, with protesters holding the streets and government forces ringing the city and conducting overnight raids. But apart from ritual condemnation, the latest bloodletting looks unlikely to trigger any significant international response, given the sharp divisions among the veto-wielding five permanent members of the UN security council. Limited sanctions on key officials imposed by the US and EU have been shrugged off by the regime. “It is incredible to consider that since March the Syrian regime has slaughtered over 1,500 people, arrested thousands, tortured people to death, and yet the UN security council has yet to issue a resolution,” said Chris Doyle of the Council for Arab-British Understanding. “Russia, China and other countries such as Brazil should have to explain their appalling positions.” An activist group, Avaaz, said last week Syrian forces had killed 1,634 people in the course of their crackdown during four-and-a-half months of protest, while at least 2,918 had disappeared. A further 26,000 had been arrested, many of whom were beaten and tortured, and 12,617 remained in detention, it said. Syria Middle East Protest Arab and Middle East unrest Bashar Al-Assad Ian Black guardian.co.uk