Syrian Uprising 2011 Information Centre: SUMMARY (26/01/2012): More than 60 martyrs across Syria today – including 9 women and 8 children. The most martyrs – at least 37 – fell in Homs where many neighbourhoods continue to be heavily shelled. It was also a bloody day in Hama, where at least 17 bodies have been dumped on the street – most of them unidentified. Meanwhile, dozens were arrested in Duma as the regime tried to reassert control over the eastern suburbs of Damascus. Syria – Thursday 26/01/2012
HAMA (26/01/2012): A horrific night in Hama, where many bodies of executed detainees have been dumped. The video shows Bab Qebli district, but this scene is repeated in other areas.
Hama 26/01/2012 (WARNING: GRAPHIC)
HOMS (26/01/2012): It’s another bloody day in Syria, with at least 42 martyrs. 22 of those martyrs, inlcuding 9 kids, fell in Homs where many neighbourhoods continue to be under heavy shelling. See the video if you want to know what slaughter looks like.
Homs 26/01/2012 (WARNING: GRAPHIC)
UPDATE (26/01/2012): While many school students were forced to attend pro-Assad rallies taking place in Damascus, Aleppo and several other cities, security forces shot dead Ali al-Muzeeb, 15, in Nawa, Daraa province, who was taking part in one of the many daily protests by school students. The video shows security forces in Duma, where there is a big security operation going on to try to reclaim the eastern suburbs of Damascus from the Free Syrian Army who has established a strong presence there in recent days.
Duma 26/01/2012
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NOW! Lebanon
[local time] 
21:47 Eleven Iranian pilgrims have been kidnapped in unrest-swept Syria, the foreign ministry said on Thursday, calling on Damascus to help secure their release.
21:21 Thursday’s death toll in Syria has increased to 62 people, Al-Jazeera quoted activists as saying.
21:04 Al-Arabiya is broadcasting live footage of a protest in Syria’s Daraa.
20:25 Thursday’s death toll in Syria has risen to 55 people, most of them killed in Homs, Al-Jazeera quoted activists as saying.
19:32 Syrian security forces killed 34 civilians, including 10 children, in clashes across the country on Thursday, a rights group said.
18:50 Around 600 people have been detained in Syria’s Hama on Thursday, Al-Arabiya quoted the General Commission of the Syrian Revolution as saying.
18:21 Thursday’s death toll in Syria has increased to 30 people, Al-Jazeera quoted the General Commission of the Syrian Revolution as saying.
18:18 A Syrian opposition figure on Thursday called on the Arab League to hold talks with Russia before turning to the United Nations for intervention in the Syria crisis.
17:36 Thursday’s death toll in Syria has risen to 21 people, the General Commission of the Syrian Revolution reported on its website.
17:23 Thursday’s death toll in Syria has risen to 12 people, the General Commission of the Syrian Revolution reported on its website.
16:13 An Arab League team is to take the 10-month-old crisis in Syria to the UN Security Council, as activists said security forces launched an assault on a protest hub near the Syrian capital on Thursday.
15:32 Syrian security forces’ gunfire killed eight, the General Commission of the Revolution said on Thursday.
15: 09 Houses in Syria’s Qusayr in Homs have been shelled on Thursday, as members of the Free Syrian Army clashed with security forces, Al-Jazeera quoted activists as saying. 14:43 Tunisia’s foreign minister on Thursday urged the Syrian regime to “listen to its people,” saying that Damascus has no other choice but to accept the Arab League’s proposals.
13:21 A former agriculture minister said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad “ordered” there be a crackdown on protest hubs, Al-Arabiya television reported on Thursday.
12:36 Syrian security forces on Thursday attacked a town north of Damascus that fell briefly under the control of deserters at the weekend, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
12:31 Thousands of Syrians gathered on Thursday in Damascus, Aleppo, Hasaka and Deir az-Zour to rally in support to President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) reported.
10:27 The International Committee of the Red Cross has demanded that the Syrian government investigate the murder of a top aid worker who was killed in the restive northwest province of Edleb.
9:59 Syrian security forces raided the city of Duma in the Damascus district, Al-Jazeera reported.
9:15 Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird announced Wednesday new sanctions against four banks, three oil companies and 22 people linked with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
9:10 The United Nations has stopped compiling a death toll for Syria’s crackdown on protests because it is too difficult to get information, UN human rights chief Navi Pillay said Wednesday.
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Reuters: Syrian troops fight rebels near Damascus
A 10-month-old revolt against President Bashar al-Assad edged closer to the Syrian capital on Thursday as troops battled rebels in a town just north of Damascus and a provincial governor spoke of negotiating local ceasefires.
A Syrian officer told Reuters clashes had been under way in Douma since the morning. Security forces were searching houses for arms and wanted suspects. Reporters were shown home-made grenades among other seized weapons.
The officer was speaking in the tense suburb of Harasta nearby, where troops were deployed in strength.
The opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said security forces had detained 200 people in raids in Douma, a hotbed of protests and armed rebellion against Assad.
Gunfire was close enough to be heard from central Damascus during the night.
“Many of them (in the opposition) have been misled. They will eventually come back to the right way,” Hussein Makhlouf, governor of Damascus countryside, told Arab League monitors before they headed for some of the capital’s troubled suburbs.
“We have started a dialogue with them, including some armed groups that are controlling positions there,” Makhlouf said.
He told the observers that the authorities were using “the same approach as in Zabadani, so the same scenario will happen.”
This month the military withdrew armored vehicles encircling the rebel-held town of Zabadani, near the border with Lebanon, after negotiating a truce with its defenders.
Arab observers stopped at an entrance to the Damascus suburb of Irbin, where a dozen soldiers stood guard. Beyond them a crowd of about 100 anti-Assad protesters shouted slogans. The troops showed the monitors the bodies of a soldier and another person they said had been killed in the morning.
The Arab observers soon drove away from the scene without going into the township.
There was no immediate word on casualties in the fighting near Damascus.
DEADLY VIOLENCE
Elsewhere, three people were killed in Homs, a sniper killed a 58-year-old woman in Hama and a 14-year-old boy was killed in the southern city of Deraa, the British-based Observatory said.
The state news agency SANA said “terrorists” had assassinated a colonel in Homs and detonated a bomb in Deraa province, killing an army lieutenant as he tried to defuse it.
SANA said 21 soldiers, security personnel and civilians killed by “armed terrorist groups” were buried on Thursday. It also reported pro-Assad demonstrations in several cities.
The monitors, now without 55 Gulf Arab colleagues withdrawn by their governments this week in protest at continued bloodshed, were resuming work after a one-week gap during which the Arab League prolonged their mission by another month.
Syrian opposition groups have accused the observer mission, which deployed on December 26, of giving Assad diplomatic cover to pursue a crackdown on protesters and rebels in which more than 5,000 people have been killed since March, by a U.N. tally.
The Arab League called on Sunday for Assad to quit as part of a transition plan for which it is seeking U.N. support.
Western and Arab diplomats are working on a draft Security Council resolution on Syria. Russiasaid it would promote its own text, but did not rule out a compromise.
Russia, one of Syria’s few remaining allies along with Iran, has rejected sanctions or military action against Assad.
The Security Council could vote as early as next week on a Western-Arab draft resolution, council diplomats said.
Arab League chief Nabil Elaraby urged Damascus to end military operations against “defenseless civilians.”
In recent months, an insurgency by army deserters and other rebels has increasingly eclipsed peaceful protests against more than four decades of rule by the Assad family.
Activists said the army deployment and clashes in townships around Damascus were a response to insurgents’ growing strength.
“The Free Syrian Army (FSA) has almost complete control of some areas of the Damascus countryside and some control in Douma and Harasta,” an activist said by telephone from Harasta.
Other activists in Douma, Harasta and Irbin said security forces had gathered in their towns after rebels retreated because they could not fight pitched battles with the army.
“Assad’s army has armored vehicles and anti-aircraft guns while we only have rifles and rocket-propelled grenades,” said an FSA fighter who called himself Abu Thaer.
The Arab League has suspended Syria and called for Assad to hand over to his deputy, pending the formation of an unity government, constitutional and security reform, and elections.
Michael Posner, the U.S. State Department’s top human rights official, said Washington would work with the League to end the bloodshed in Syria, reiterating that Assad must go.
(Additional reporting by Erika Solomon in Beirut, Khaled Yacoub Oweis in Amman, John Irish in Paris and Tom Perry in Cairo; Writing by Alistair Lyon; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
Outside Syria’s capital, suburbs look like war zone
When Arab League observers headed to the suburbs of Damascus Thursday, Syrian security refused to accompany them to most areas, because they are no longer in control there.
In some towns no more than a 15-minute drive from the capital, the governor of rural Damascus warned that gunmen were walking the streets.
But the monitors went, accompanied by journalists, to the outskirts of Irbin and Harasta, which have become hotbeds for protests and armed revolt since the 10-month uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began.
At a checkpoint on an intersection heading into the town of Irbin, dozens of soldiers with assault rifles were deployed in full gear and on alert. On the sidewalk near them lay the bodies of two men shot dead, one of them a soldier.
But the soldiers were fixated nervously on the anti-Assad protest just hundreds of meters away, with protesters chanting “Allahu Akbar.” Most shops were closed and people gave the Arab League monitors suspicious looks.
“Some people are angry with us because of the report,” one observer said.
The observer team sent a report last week on their mission to check implementation of an Arab peace plan that aims to halt bloodshed from Assad’s military crackdown on the unrest that the United Nations says has killed more than 5,000 people.
Syria says the revolt is run by foreign-backed militants that have killed over 2,000 of its forces.
While the Arab League came out with a strong statement calling for Assad to step down, many in the Syrian opposition were angry at the monitors’ report, which highlighted violence by Assad’s adversaries as much as by the government itself.
They said monitors neglected the balance of power in the struggle between protesters and rebels against the army.
Reuters, which joined the monitors on their first observation trip since the report, is in Syria on a state-sponsored trip and is usually accompanied by a government minder.
The Arab observers watched the anti-Assad demonstration from afar, and minutes later they drove away toward a police hospital in Harasta, another flashpoint in the revolt.
The team head, Jaafar al-Kubaida, said the monitors did not enter Irbin because they were worried the “angry crowd” might harass them. “Teams are harassed sometimes, we feared they might attack the cars or throw stones at us. It has happened before.”
CARS WITH “ISRAELI BOMBS”
At the police hospital in Harasta, the staff said most of rural Damascus was not controlled by the government forces and gunmen were kidnapping and killing those affiliated with the government in those areas.
“Any car plate that belongs to the government cannot drive inside Harasta, we as doctors cannot go, they hijacked one of our cars a week ago,” said a doctor in the hospital.
A soldier pointed at a mosque facing the checkpoint and said, “You see that mosque? Their snipers sometimes fire at us from there.”
A senior officer said that security forces were in talks with the armed men through dignitaries in the towns, hoping to convince them to hand over their weapons. He said the government had not completely lost control of the Damascus countryside.
“No, you cannot say that they are in control of rural Damascus, they control areas and the army control areas,” he told Reuters.
When Arab observers pressed a senior officer to allow them entry into the troubled town, he said it was too dangerous.
“The coordination (team) did not get back to us, we told them you wanted to go but still no reply from them, We want you to go to them under their protection,” a senior officer told the monitors.
The monitors were frustrated they could not enter, but also said they were unsure if their presence was wanted after their first report. “We would love to go, but I’m not sure we are welcomed there,” one observer told Reuters.
Security officials showed monitors three cars which they said were towed from inside Harasta and Douma. They said the vehicles were confiscated from “terrorists” and loaded with Israeli bombs.
Inside Harasta, the army was heavily deployed. Dozens of soldiers in full gear were deployed in a 500-metre (1,650-foot)-long street, their guns pointed up as they nervously watched the nearby houses. People peeked from their windows but few went out. The trash-littered streets was almost deserted.
“Free Syria” was written on a wall.
“Yes, it is not safe,” said a veiled woman who was walking a man down the street. She looked worried and scared. “There are gunmen but we do not have the Free Syria Army here.”
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Guardian: Syria
• The chief of the Arab League and the Qatari prime minister are to head to New York on Saturday to seek support for an Arab plan for Syria. Nabil al-Arabi said he and Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al-Thani would “hold a meeting with the UN Security Council on Monday to seek ratification of the Arab League decision on Syria”. Arab League observers resumed monitoring inspections today for the first time since Gulf states pulled out of the mission.
• Russia said it would continue to promote its own draft UN resolution on Syria. Foreign ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich was quoted as saying that any proposal that demanded Bashar al-Assad‘s resignation- as the Arab plan does- would “simply never get approval”.
• Activists claimed the Syrian Army had raided the Damascus suburb of Douma, hours after military defectors told the BBC that they controlled the town. One report said the army faced no resistance but an activist group said there were heavy clashes between the Free Syrian Army and the regular army. Across the country, the death toll was 42, said the LCC activist network.
• The UN said it was unable to update its estimate of 5,000 people killed in Syria since the uprising began more than 10 months ago.Human rights chief Navi Pillay said the death toll was more than that but that the figure could not be updated because of “fragmentation on the ground”.