BEIRUT — Residents of Hama told of indiscriminate shelling by the army, snipers aiming at civilians and corpses piling up in the streets in the wake of a week-long military siege of the defiant city.
The government, however, claimed it was ridding the city of “terrorists.” Having blocked nearly all outside witnesses to the violence, President Bashar Assad is stubbornly insisting that terrorists and thugs — not pro-democracy protesters determined to bring him down — are driving the 5-month-old uprising.
Most of the 1,700 people killed since March in the crackdown have been unarmed, peaceful protesters, according to activists and human-rights groups.
“We would like to thank the government!” a Hama resident told The Associated Press by telephone before bursting into laughter. “What they are saying is pure lies. When they bombed the city, they bombed it randomly. They shot anything that moved in the streets. They were killing people in the streets.”
He asked that his name not be published, fearing retribution from government forces.
The Obama administration, which announced new sanctions Wednesday, is preparing for the first time to explicitly call for Assad to step down, officials have told AP.
The military assaults continued Wednesday. The Local Coordinating Committees, an opposition group that helps organize and document the protests, identified 15 people killed in the central city of Homs, another center of protests.
The siege of Hama began last week with the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, when the regime feared large prayer gatherings at mosques nightly after the daytime fast would turn into a new wave of anti-government protests.
On Wednesday, Ministry of Information officials escorted journalists on a trip to the city designed to portray the military as Syria’s savior.
“We have finished a delicate operation in which we eradicated terrorists’ hideouts,” an army officer told reporters in the city, some 130 miles north of the capital, Damascus.
Piles of uncollected garbage littered the streets as soldiers removed concrete and metal barriers from the streets. About 50 armored personnel carriers on flatbed trucks headed out of the city, a sign that the military was pulling out after the deadly siege.
International condemnation has been strong and is growing more forceful. On Wednesday, the Obama administration slapped sanctions on Syria’s largest commercial bank and cellphone operator as it moved to demand the end of four decades of dictatorship under the Assad family.
Assad met with envoys from India, Brazil and South Africa and “acknowledged that some mistakes had been made by the security forces in the initial stages of the unrest” and reassured the delegations that reforms were coming, according to the envoys.
