Human rights activists and witnesses said Syrian security forces opened fire on tens of thousands of protesters in Daraa, killing 25 and wounding hundreds.
But state TV said 19 policemen and members of the security forces were killed when gunmen opened fire on them. It was the first significant claim of casualties by the government, which has contended that armed gangs rather than true reform-seekers are behind the unrest — and it could signal plans for a stepped-up retaliation.
In protests elsewhere at least seven people were killed. Protest organizers have called on Syrians to take to the streets every Friday for the past three weeks, demanding change. The protests have shaken the regime of President Bashar Assad, whose family has ruled Syria for nearly 40 years.
Witnesses in Deraa said that residents turned mosques into makeshift hospitals to help tend to hundreds of wounded protesters. One man who helped ferry the dead and wounded to the city's hospital said he counted at least 13 corpses.
"My clothes are soaked in blood," he said by telephone from Daraa.
A nurse at the hospital said they had run out of beds; many people were being treated on the floor or in nearby mosques.
Ammar Qurabi, who heads Syria's National Organization for Human Rights, said most of the deaths happened in Daraa, which has become a flash point for anti-government protests.
Twenty-five people were killed in Deraa, three in the Damascus suburb of Harasta, three in the central city of Homs and one person in Douma, he said.
"I saw pools of blood and three bodies in the street being picked up by relatives," another Daraa resident said by telephone.
"There were snipers on roofs. Gunfire was heavy. The injured are being taken to homes. No one trusts putting his relative in a hospital in these circumstances," he added. Many protesters feared they would be arrested if taken to clinics.
The city's Omari Mosque was turned once again into a makeshift clinic, residents said, and its loudspeakers broadcast an appeal for medical assistance.
The official SANA news agency quoted an Interior Ministry source as saying there were "19 martyrs among the police and security forces and 75 wounded by armed groups which used live ammunition in Daraa."
A Westerner living in the Kfar Souseh district of Damascus said police and Assad loyalists attacked protesters as they left a mosque. "I never saw so many thugs in my life. They beat them with electric batons and with sticks that had nails sticking out," said the witness.
Residents and activists reported demonstrations in the coastal town of Banias and in Tel. In several cities they chanted: "Christians and Muslims, we want freedom."
The witness accounts could not be independently confirmed because the regime has restricted media access to the flash points. Human rights groups say around 115 people have been killed in the security crackdown.
Thousands also marched in five towns in northern Syria, mainly in predominantly Kurdish Hassake and Ammuda, calling for an end to emergency rule and the release of prisoners, another rights activist said.
"More than 3,000 people — Kurds, Arabs and Assyrians (Christians) — demonstrated in Qamishli after Friday prayers before staging a sit-in on the main road," Kurdish rights activist Radif Mustafa said.
The rallies came a day after Assad granted citizenship to tens of thousands of Kurds who had been denied nationality for nearly half a century because of a controversial census.
In Douma, residents formed committees to verify the identities of people arriving for a rally to check they were not armed, a rights activist said.
He said demonstrators and authorities had reached an agreement allowing protesters to rally without security force intervention.
