REUTERS AFRICA: DAMASCUS/DERAA, Syria - Protests spread across Syria on Friday, challenging the rule of the Assad family after their forces killed dozens of demonstrators in the south.
In the southern city of Deraa, which has been in revolt for a week, gunfire and tear gas scattered a crowd of thousands after people lit a fire under a statue of late president Hafez al-Assad, whose son Bashar has ruled since his death in 2000.
Al Jazeera aired comments by a man who said security forces had killed 20 people on Friday in the nearby town of Sanamein.
In Hama, in the centre of the country, where the elder Assad put down an Islamist revolt in 1982 at a cost of many thousands of lives, residents said people streamed through the streets after weekly prayers chanting "Freedom is ringing out!" -- a slogan heard in uprisings sweeping the rest of the Arab world. » | Khaled Yacoub Oweis and Suleiman al-Khalidi / Additional reporting by Yara Bayoumy in Beirut; writing by Alastair Macdonald; editing by Mark Heinrich | Friday, March 25, 2011
