“Twenty-one people, some civilians and others police officers, were killed in Homs on Monday during operations by the army and the security services in several neighborhoods of the city,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Troops shot dead two other civilians, one in Idlib province in the northwest and the other a 13-year-old boy in Hama, a protest center north of Homs, the Britain-based watchdog said.
Seven soldiers were also killed in clashes with gunmen suspected of being army defectors in Homs province, the Observatory reported earlier. It added that 20 soldiers fled into nearby orchards after those exchanges.
Meanwhile, a major activist group on Monday accused Syrian security forces of stepping up their crackdown on doctors suspected of treating wounded anti-government protesters. The Local Coordination Committees, which helps organize the protests and documents human rights violations in Syria, said that it had documented the arrests of 25 doctors and pharmacists from private clinics and hospitals in the past few weeks. The group said 250 doctors and pharmacists have been arrested since the start of the uprising against President Bashar Assad seven months ago.
The accusation that Syria is targeting doctors and raiding hospitals in search of wounded protesters has been made before by leading international human rights groups. Last month, New York-based Human Rights Watch said Syrian security forces “forcibly removed” patients from a hospital and prevented doctors from reaching the wounded during a military siege in the restive central city of Homs.
The group cited testimony from witnesses, including doctors.
In August, the US-based Physicians for Human Rights released a report also accusing Syrian authorities of targeting medical facilities, health workers and their patients. It said security forces control access to hospitals, and many injured civilians in need of critical care are forgoing treatment because they fear being detained and tortured if they seek care at government-controlled medical facilities.
There have been other reports of security forces targeting hospitals and rounding up the wounded in Syria and in Bahrain, where there were widespread protests this year led by the country’s Shiite majority against the long-ruling Sunni monarchy.
