DAMASCUS: Army tanks Saturday entered a village bordering Turkey, where 10,000 Syrians have sought refuge, an activist said, as Washington warned Damascus over its “continued brutality” against protesters. Meanwhile, Britain, France, Germany and Portugal are sponsoring a draft resolution at the UN Security Council to condemn Syria. With the deadly revolt now in its fourth month, Britain urged its nationals to leave Syria “now,” warning that its embassy in Damascus was unlikely to be able to help if the situation gets worse. As many as 19 people were killed in protests Friday, the Local Coordination Committee of anti-government activists said. Soldiers in at least six tanks and 15 troop transporters entered the border village of Bdama, widening the crackdown focused in the northwestern province of Idlib, activist Rami Abdel Rahman said. The head of the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said “heavy gunfire” broke out in the village, north of the flashpoint town of Jisr Al-Shughour. Residents of Bdama had been supplying refugees fleeing across the border from the Jisr area, he said, contacted by telephone from Nicosia. The number of refugees fleeing into Turkey has now topped 10,000. The attack on Bdama came a day after Syrian forces swept into Maaret Al-Numan, a town on the highway linking Damascus with Aleppo. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged a transition to democracy in Syria, saying in a commentary in the Asharq Al-Awsat Arabic newspaper that the crackdown would not quell the momentum for change. Clinton wrote under the headline “There Is No Going Back in Syria” that it was “increasingly clear” the crackdown was an irreversible shift in the country's push toward reform, in an English translation provided by the US State Department. The regime's “continued brutality may allow (Assad) to delay the change that is under way in Syria, it will not reverse it,” Clinton wrote.
