AMMAN (Reuters) – Thousands of Syrians fled the historic town of Maarat al-Numaan to escape troops and tanks thrusting into the north in a widening military campaign to crush protests against President Bashar al-Assad.
In the tribal east, where Syria's 380,000 barrels per day of oil is produced, tanks and armored vehicles deployed in the city of Deir al-Zor and around Albu Kamal on the border with Iraq, a week after tens of thousands of people took to the streets demanding an end to Assad's autocratic rule.
"Cars are continuing to stream out of Maarat al-Numaan in all directions," one witness told Reuters by phone. "People are loading them with everything, blankets, mattresses on roofs."
Syrian forces pushed toward the town of 100,000 that straddles the main north-south highway linking Damascus with Syria's second largest city Aleppo, after arresting hundreds of people in villages close to Jisr al-Shughour, near the border with Turkey, residents said.
The government said security had been restored in Jisr al-Shughour after fighting earlier this month in which it said 120 security personnel were killed, and urged residents who fled the military crackdown on the rebellious town to return.
Witnesses said residents assisted by deserting security forces had attacked a police compound in Jisr al-Shughour 10 days ago after police killed 48 civilians. About 60 police, including 20 deserters, were killed.
A statement issued after a cabinet meeting on Tuesday also said Syria's Red Crescent aid organization would coordinate with Turkey "to facilitate the return of Syrian citizens."
More than 8,500 Syrians have sought sanctuary in Turkey, which has set up four refugee camps across the border from Jisr al-Shughour.
A 36-year-old Syrian who gave his name as Ahmed fled with his wife and six children to Turkey after learning troops had arrived in Jisr al-Shughour, near a village where he resides.
"We came here to protect our family. We're not against them (security forces) but they fight us like we were infidels," Ahmed, sunburnt and dressed in a dirty tracksuit, told Reuters in a narrow street in the Turkish border village of Guvecci.
A Turkish Red Crescent official, who requested anonymity, said more tent camps were being prepared at the eastern end of the 800 km border, near the Turkish city of Mardin, far from where the current influx of refugees is concentrated.
The state-run Anatolian news agency said an envoy from Assad, Hassan Turkmani, would visit Turkey on Wednesday for talks with Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan. The Turkish leader had developed a close rapport with Assad but has grown increasingly critical of his military crackdown.
MOST RESIDENTS HAVE FLED
In Damascus, thousands of Assad supporters lined one of the capital's main thoroughfares and lifted a 2,300-meter-long tri-color Syrian flag, while waving pictures of the president.
Syrian rights groups say 1,300 civilians have been killed since the start of the uprising in March against Assad, whose family have ruled Syria for 41 years. One Syrian rights group, says more than 300 soldiers and police have also been killed.
The U.N Human rights office accused Syrian security forces on Wednesday of brutally repressing protests through executions, mass arrests and torture.
Around 70 percent of Maarat al-Numaan's residents have fled, Othman al-Bedeiwi, a pharmacy professor there told Reuters by telephone on Tuesday. He said helicopters, which also fired at protesters on Friday, had been ferrying troops to a staging camp in Wadi al-Deif, several kilometers from the town.
Syria has banned most foreign correspondents since the unrest began, making it difficult to verify accounts of events.
On the edge of a limestone massif in a relatively prosperous agricultural area, Maarat al-Numaan is a center of Muslim pilgrimage with a rebellious history.
It was the site of the massacre of thousands of men, women and children by Crusader forces in 1099. In modern times, the town was focus of a brutal campaign to crush Islamist and leftist challengers to Bashar's father, the late Hafez al-Assad.
In the eastern province of Deir al-Zor, witnesses said several tanks deployed inside the provincial capital, on the Euphrates river, after security forces pulled out from the streets last week.
But protests continued and a violent confrontation occurred this week between Assad supporters and protesters during which several people were seriously wounded, they added.
Rights campaigners said around 20 tanks and armored vehicles also deployed around the town of Albu Kamal to the east of Deir al-Zor city, but said there were no troops inside the town. Albu Kamal is also an official crossing point to Iraq.
Deir al-Zor province borders Iraq's Sunni heartland. The two sides are linked by family ties and trade routes that preceded the creation of the two states by colonial powers in the 1920s.
France and Britain have been pushing for a U.N. Security Council resolution to condemn Assad's repression of the protests. But Russia and China have suggested they might use their veto power to kill the resolution.
As well as the refugees inside Turkey, more than half of whom are women and children, activists say another 10,000 are sheltering inside Syria close to the border.
Fleeing refugees described shootings by troops and Alawite gunmen loyal to Assad, known as "shabbiha," and the burning of land and crops in a scorched earth policy to subdue people of the region after large protests. The government has accused "armed groups" of burning crops in an act of sabotage.
(Additional reporting by Tulay Kardeniz in Guvecci, Turkey; Simon Cameron-Moore in Ankara; Editing by Dominic Evans and David Stamp)
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