BEIRUT — Security forces in Syria met thousands of demonstrators with fusillades of live ammunition after noon prayers Friday, killing at least 81 people in the bloodiest day of the 5-week-old Syrian uprising, according to protesters, witnesses and accounts on social networking sites.
From the Mediterranean coast and Kurdish east to the steppe of the Houran in southern Syria, protesters gathered in at least 20 cities and towns, including in the outskirts of the capital, Damascus. Cries for vengeance intersected with calls for the government’s fall, marking a potentially dangerous new dynamic in the revolt.
“We want revenge, and we want blood,” said Abu Mohamed, a protester in Azra, a southern town that had the highest death toll Friday. “Blood for blood.”
The breadth of the protests — and people’s willingness to defy security forces who were deployed en masse — painted a picture of turmoil in one of the Arab world’s most authoritarian countries. In scenes unprecedented only weeks ago, protesters tore down pictures of President Bashar Assad and toppled statues of his father, Hafez, in two towns on the capital’s outskirts, according to witnesses and video footage.
But despite the bloodshed, which promised to unleash another day of unrest as the dead are buried today, the scale of the protests, so far, seemed to fall short of the popular upheaval of revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia.
Organizers said the movement was still in its infancy, and the government, building on 40 years of institutional inertia, still commanded the loyalty of the military, economic elite and sizable minorities of Christian and heterodox Muslim sects who fear the state’s collapse.
Coming a day after Assad endorsed the lifting of draconian emergency rule, the killings represented another chapter in Syria’s strategy of alternating promises of concessions with a grim crackdown that has left it staggering but still entrenched.
“There are indications the regime is scared, and this is adding to the momentum, but this is still the beginning,” said Wissam Tarif, executive director of Insan, a Syrian human rights group. “Definitely, we haven’t seen the millions we saw in Egypt or Tunisia. The numbers are still humble, and it’s a reality we have to acknowledge.”
The images of carnage marked one of the deadliest days of the Arab Spring, and the coming days may be replete with its lessons. In other places in the Middle East, violence has led to funerals where many more are often killed. The government’s belated attempts at reform, meanwhile, have often simply escalated protesters’ demands.
That government faces perhaps its greatest challenge: to maintain its bastions of support with promises for the future and threats that its collapse means chaos against the momentum that the vivid symbols of martyrdom have so often encouraged.
“We are not scared anymore,” said Abu Nadim, a protester in Douma, a town on the outskirts of Damascus. “We are sad and we are disappointed at this regime and at the president. Protests, demonstrations and death are now part of the daily routine.”
In a sharply worded statement, the White House on Friday said the “outrageous use of violence to quell protests must come to an end now.”
The statement, which comes after warnings to Iran against capitalizing on the region’s unrest, also said that Assad was seeking Iranian help in repressing his people but did not provide details.
In the capital, a city that underlines the very authority of the Assad family’s decades of rule, hundreds gathered after Friday Prayer at the al-Hassan Mosque. Some of them chanted, “The people want the fall of the government,” a slogan made famous in both Egypt and Tunisia. But security forces quickly dispersed the protests with tear gas, witnesses said.
Nadim, the protester in Douma, said plainclothes security forces carrying machine guns were omnipresent in the town. He said snipers were stationed on top of two hospitals. Protesters left the mosque after noon prayers, their numbers growing to 5,000, he said. They were met a force of 3,000 security men, he said.
“The minute they saw us they started shooting at us,” he said.
Protesters retreated, then surged again.
“Peaceful! Peaceful!” he said they shouted as the gunfire continued.
Razan Zeitouneh, an activist with the Syrian Human Rights Information Link in Damascus, basing her account on witnesses, said 88 people were killed — 20 in Azra; one in Daraa; 22 near Homs, Syria’s third-largest city; 39 in the suburbs of Damascus; one in Latakia, a coastal city; three in Hama and two elsewhere.
Tarif’s group, Insan, said 81 people were killed.
Before Friday, activists said, more than 200 people had been killed in the revolt.
