The National Hospital in Homs received five bodies after tanks fired into the residential Bab Al-Amro district early in the morning, Najati Tayara told Reuters from Homs, in central Syria and the country’s third largest city.

“A hail of bullets kept coming down from a rooftop after Naqour as killed. The authorities have been playing on fears of sectarian strife. They are now spreading rumors that terrorists on motorcycles killed him,” Tayara said.

He said another man was killed by a sniper shot to the head as he stood in front of his house in the adjacent district of Inshaat.

“The security forces are terrorizing urban centers,” said Tayara.

There was no immediate comment from Syrian authorities, who have banned most international media from Syria, making it difficult to verify accounts of events.

In the south, four civilians in the town of Tafas were killed as security forces widened a campaign of arrests, a human rights campaigner in the region said, adding 300 people had been detained since tanks arrived there on Saturday.

In Damascus, security forces have arrested opposition leader Mazen Adi, from the People’s Democratic Party founded by Syria’s top dissident, Riad Al-Turk, according to rights activists.

They added that thousands of pro-democracy Syrians had been arrested and beaten in the last two months, including scores on Wednesday in Homs and in the coastal city of Banias.

Assad initially responded to the unrest, the most serious challenge to his 11-year grip on power, with promises of reform and assertions that the demonstrators were serving a foreign conspiracy to sow sectarian strife.

He also lifted a 48-year state of emergency that security services had used to suppress any manifestation of dissent.

The state news agency SANA said on Thursday a government committee had been formed to draft a new election law, but gave no details.

Despite the pledges of reform, Assad uncorked a military crackdown on dissent, first in Deraa where protesters first took to the streets on March 18, then to some other cities.

A cousin of the president said the Assad family was not going to capitulate. “We will sit here. We call it a fight until the end ... They should know when we suffer, we will not suffer alone,” Rami Makhlouf told the New York Times.

Makhlouf, a tycoon in his early 40s who owns several monopolies, and his brother, a secret police chief, have been under specific US sanctions since 2007 for corruption.

Demonstrators have angrily shouted the name of Makhlouf as a symbol of graft in a country that has been facing severe water shortages and unemployment ranging from government estimates of 10 percent to independent estimates of 25 percent. Makhlouf says he is a businessman whose companies provide jobs for thousands of Syrians.

In Banias, protesters held up pictures of Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan to salute him for his stand against what they perceive as Assad’s iron fist policy toward opposition.

Erdogan, whose country is one of the few parliamentary democracies in the region, has maintained close trade and diplomatic ties with Assad. But Erdogan has also disputed the official Damascus account of recent political violence in Syria.

Syrian officials have blamed most of the violence on “armed terrorist groups,” backed by radicals and foreign agitators, and say about 100 soldiers and police have been killed.

Erdogan said more than 1,000 civilians had died in Syria’s upheaval. He said he did not want to see a repeat of the 1982 bloodshed in Hama or the 1988 gassing of Kurds in the Iraqi town of Halabja.

In Geneva, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Syria to halt mass arrests and to heed calls for reform. Ban also said that UN humanitarian workers and human rights monitors must be allowed into Deraa as well as other cities.