Syria dissidents meet as crackdown claims more lives

Anti-government demonstrators Representatives of Syria's six-month-old protest movement joined opposition parties in Turkey on Saturday to forge a united front against Bashar al-Assad's regime after violence claimed at least 19 more lives.
Clashes between security forces and deserters killed 11 people in a village in Hama province on Friday, while another eight died during a crackdown on protests in flashpoint Homs, human rights activists said.
One group, the Local Coordination Committees, put Friday's death toll as high as 23.
Thousands of protesters had taken to the streets on the Muslim weekly day of prayer, a lightning rod in the protests against President Assad in which the United Nations says 2,700 people have been killed.
The protests were held under the slogan "victory for our Syria and our Yemen."
In Istanbul, meanwhile, the Syrian National Council, a group seeking to unite Assad's opponents, was opening a two-day meeting on Saturday to elect a leadership and thrash out a recruitment policy.
Elsewhere on the political front, Syria's ambassador to the United States Imad Mustapha was called in to the State Department and "read the riot act" about an attempted attack on US ambassador Robert Ford.
A mob of nearly 100 Syrians chanting hostile slogans tried to storm an office in Damascus where Ford had arrived to meet opposition figure Hassan Abdelazim on Thursday.
Mustapha "was reminded that Ambassador Ford is the personal representative of the president (Barack Obama) and an attack on Ford is an attack on the United States," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters.
Ford spoke on his Facebook page Friday about the incident, saying the damage to the vehicles could not have been done "by eggs and tomatoes."
"Protesters threw concrete blocks at the windows and hit the cars with iron bars," he said.
The Assad regime had earlier accused Washington of inciting "armed groups" to commit violence against its army.
The UN Security Council remains divided over whether to threaten Assad's regime with sanctions over its deadly crackdown on dissent.
European nations on Friday dropped the word "sanctions" from a proposed resolution on Syria in a bid to temper Russian opposition.
France, Britain, Germany and Portugal instead called for "targeted measures" in their draft text.
Russia and China have threatened to veto any resolution calling for punitive measures against Damascus.
On the ground, activists said those killed in Homs were shot dead by security forces, while around 250 tanks and armoured vehicles entered Rastan, a major city in the province and the scene of intense operations against army defectors.
"Five civilians and six military and security agents have been killed today in the village of Kafar Zita during clashes between soldiers and agents on one side and deserters on the other," the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
"Eight civilians were killed Friday in Homs province" by security force fire, added the Britain-based watchdog.
Much of the violence was in Rastan, about 180 kilometres (120 miles) from Damascus and a gateway to the north, where battles have raged since Tuesday between the army and deserters who refuse to fire on protesters.
The Observatory, citing a local activist, said an army officer was shot dead by pro-regime gunmen "for refusing to go to Rastan as ordered."
Activists also reported protests in other locations including 10,000 people in Palmyra (Tadmur) in central Syria, as well as thousands in Hama, also in the centre, Idlib in the northwest and Zabadani just north of Damascus.
Security forces opened fire against protesters, activists said, without indicating the number of casualties.
The office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva has said the death toll from the bloody crackdown has risen to more than 2,700 since March 15.