The fresh surge of violence came as Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said Assad will have to leave power if he fails to implement reforms acceptable to the opposition, and Damascus again blamed "terrorists" for the unrest.
"If the Syrian leadership is unable to undertake these reforms, it will have to go. But this is something that has to be decided not by NATO or individual European countries but by the people and leadership of Syria," Itar-TASS quoted Medvedev as saying.
Four civilians, including two elderly men, were killed in the central city of Homs where security forces opened fire and four others in the outskirts of Damascus, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
A man was killed in an ambush by security forces in the flashpoint northern town of Jisr Al-Shughur near the Turkish border.
Meanwhile, a prominent Kurdish opposition figure was shot dead by masked gunmen in northeastern Syria. A spokesman for the Local Coordination Committees, Omar Idilbi, said Mashaal Tammo was killed by gunmen who raided a home in the predominantly Kurdish city of Kamishli. Tammo is a well known activist who headed a political party called the Kurdish Future Current.
Prominent opposition figure and former MP Riad Seif had to be given hospital treatment after being beaten outside a mosque in the capital's commercial neighborhood of Medan.
Mosques in Syria, as happens every week, again became springboards for Friday anti-regime protests, and also this time in support of the Syrian National Council (SNC), formed to represent the main opposition groups, activists said.
Pro-democracy activists had called for fresh demonstrations under the banner: "The Syrian National Council is our representative, mine, yours and that of all Syrians."
Demonstrators in the restive Damascus district of Barzeh carried slogans affirming their "complete support" for the SNC, YouTube videos showed, while protesters in Homs chanted "the people want the fall of the president."
