Forces loyal to President Bashar Al-Assad shot dead 10 people Tuesday in the Syrian city of Hama, activists said, and France called on the United Nations to adopt a firm stance in the face of “ferocious armed repression”. Tanks were still surrounding Hama, days after it witnessed some of the biggest protests against Assad's rule since a 14-week uprising erupted in March. The attacks focused on two districts north of the Orontes River, which splits the city of 650,000 people in half. Residents said the dead included two brothers, Baha and Khaled Al-Nahar, who were killed at a roundabout. Troops raided towns to the northwest of Hama near the border with Turkey in Idlib province, and authorities intensified a campaign of arrests that has resulted in the detention of at least 500 people across Syria in the last few days, rights campaigners said. In the eastern provincial capital of Deir Al-Zor, security forces arrested Ahmad Tuma, a former political prisoner and secretary general of the Damascus Declaration, a grouping of opposition figures founded in 2005 to unify efforts to transform the country into a democracy. “Heavily armed ‘amn' (security police) came to Dr Tuma's clinic and dragged him away in front of his patients,” one of Tuma's friends told Reuters by phone. Tuesday's raid by security forces and gunmen loyal to Assad followed the killings of at least three people when troops and security police entered Hama at dawn Monday. French Foreign Ministry spokesman Romain Nadal said the world could not stand by “inactive and powerless” in the face of the violence. “We are hoping that the Security Council adopt a clear and firm position and we call on all the members of the Security Council to take responsibility in light of this dramatic situation with a Syrian population subjected day after day to an unacceptable, ferocious and implacable armed repression.” French MP Gerard Bapt, head of the French-Syrian Friendship Committee, told Reuters: “With the Arab League saying nothing to condemn the killings by the Syrian regime it is difficult to see international pressure rising beyond the economic.” France, unlike its European partners and the United States, says Assad has lost legitimacy to rule. But a French campaign for UN condemnation of the crackdown has met stiff Russian and Chinese resistance. France's Foreign Minister Alain Juppe, who held talks in Moscow last week, said Tuesday there were signs Russia was beginning to question its Syrian stance. He said he attempted to sway his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, but that Russia was still threatening to use a veto against the resolution. __
