"In an ambush Wednesday afternoon in (the town of) Talbisa, terrorists fired on a military bus killing one officer and two soldiers and wounding seven others," said a military official quoted by the agency.

At Al-Rastan further north, "a terrorist group fired on a military vehicle killing five soldiers," the official told SANA.

The Syrian government has never said how many members of its security forces have been killed in the regime's crackdown on protests that began in March, but activists and human rights groups say about 400 have died.

More than 2,200 people, mostly civilians, have been killed since the beginning of the uprising against President Bashar Assad's regime, the United Nations says.

Meanwhile, masked gunmen dragged Syria's best-known political cartoonist from his car before dawn Thursday, beat him severely and broke both his hands as a warning to stop drawing just days after he compared Syria's president to Muammar Qaddafi, a relative and activists said.

Hospitalized with serious injuries, 60-year-old Ali Ferzat has become the most famous victim of the repression of Syria's five-month uprising. The attack on him was a stark reminder that no Syrian is immune to the crackdown.

"This is just a warning," the gunmen told Ferzat, according to a relative who asked that her name not be used for fear of reprisals. "We will break your hands so that you'll stop drawing," the gunmen said. The men then singed the artist's beard, put a bag over his head and dumped him on the side of the road.

The widely popular cartoonist, who works late into the night, left his studio at 4 a.m. Thursday, the relative and several activists familiar with the attack told The Associated Press. A jeep with tinted windows soon started trailing him and cut him off on a Damascus street. Four masked gunmen dragged him out of his car, bundled him into the jeep and drove him to the airport road just outside Damascus, beating him and making threats all the while.

After news of the attack broke, online social networking sites exploded with angry postings.

Omar Idilbi, a spokesman for the Local Coordination Committees, an activist group that helps organize and track the uprising, blamed security forces for the attack, although Rami Abdul-Rahman, head of the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said the identity of the attackers could not be confirmed.

On Wednesday night protesters chanted "bye, bye Qaddafi, Bashar your turn is coming." The new chant, inspired by the apparent collapse of Qaddafi's rule, was filmed by residents in the Damascus suburb of Duma after Isha prayers.

But Assad remained defiant and in eastern Syria, tanks and armored vehicles entered Shuhail, a town southeast of the provincial capital of Deir Al-Zour, where daily protests have taken place against Assad's rule since the start of Ramadan.