Syria dissidents meet in Turkey amid crackdown
Representatives of Syria's six-month-old protest movement and opposition parties met in Turkey yesterday a united front against Bashar al-Assad's regime after violence claimed at least 21 more lives.
Clashes between security forces and deserters killed 11 people in a village of Hama province on Friday, while another eight died during a crackdown on protests in flashpoint Homs, human rights activists said.
Two men died yesterday wounds after being shot by security forces at Harasta and Qudsaya near Damascus, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The Local Coordination Committees group put Friday's death toll at 23.
Thousands of protesters had taken to the streets on Friday, the Muslim weekly day of prayer and a lightning rod in the protests against President Assad in which the United Nations says 2,700 people have been killed.
In Istanbul, the Syrian National Council, which is trying to unite opponents to Assad's regime, was holding negotiations behind closed doors.
Several opposition movements are trying to reach an alliance, SNC member Khaled Khoja told AFP.
"We have been holding discussions for several days with Burhan Ghalioun; there are also Kurds and representatives of tribes," he said.
Ghalioun, a France-based academic, was recently designated leader of a rival opposition group, the National Transitional Council, which has Islamist and nationalist supporters.
"When the SNC meets, there will be a new assembly which will be expanded to these new movements," Khoja said, adding that the meeting scheduled for Saturday would now not take place before Sunday at the earliest because of the negotiations.
Elsewhere on the political front, Syria's ambassador to the United States Imad Mustapha was called in to the State Department and "read the riot act" about an attempted attack on US ambassador Robert Ford.
The UN Security Council remains divided over whether to threaten Assad's regime with sanctions over its deadly crackdown on dissent.
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