ASSOCIATED PRESS

BRUSSELS/BEIRUT: Syrian troops stormed villages close to the border with Turkey Thursday, hunting military defectors who fought back in clashes that left at least four soldiers and three others dead, activists said.
The fighting in the country’s restive northern region of Jabal al-Zawiya, where Syrian military defectors are active, was the latest sign of a trend toward growing militarization of the seven-month-old uprising.

The Syrian opposition had until recently focused on nonviolent resistance. But since late July, a group calling itself the Free Syrian Army has claimed attacks across the country and emerged as the first significant armed challenge to President Bashar Assad’s autocratic government.

The opposition has mostly welcomed the armed group’s formation, and the movement could propel the Syrian revolt by encouraging senior officers to desert the regime.
But the escalation could also backfire, giving Syrian authorities a new pretext to crack down harder on anti-government movements.

The U.N.’s human rights office Thursday raised its tally of people killed during seven months of unrest in Syria to more than 2,900, including members of the security forces. The figure rose by at least 200 since the beginning of September.

In Syria, some 75 opposition figures, headed by prominent dissident Hassan Abdul-Azim, held a rare public meeting near the capital Damascus and called for the downfall of the regime.

In a statement issued after the gathering, the participants said praised the recent formation of the Syrian National Council as a “positive step on the road to uniting the opposition inside and outside Syria.”
The broad-based council announced in Istanbul earlier this week brings together opposition figures from inside and outside Syria in a united front that appears to be the most serious step yet to unify a deeply fragmented dissident movement.

State-run Syrian TV, which said it had been invited to cover the meeting, was asked by organizers to leave soon after the meeting began. By allowing the meeting to take place, the Syrian government may be trying to show it would tolerate some degree of dissent if it comes from within Syria. In other political developments, the European Union is moving to widen its sanctions against Syria, officials said Thursday, adding that Syria’s largest commercial bank is a target.

The EU moves would come after the failure by the U.S. and European allies to pass a U.N. Security Council resolution threatening sanctions against Syria. Russia and China vetoed Tuesday’s measure, which would have been the first legally binding council resolution against Syria since Assad’s forces began their crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in mid-March.

The latest sanctions will likely not be ready yet for EU foreign ministers to endorse during Monday’s monthly council meeting. But a high-ranking EU official said they should be pushed through “in the coming days.”

On the ground Thursday, four troops and three others died in clashes in villages in the west of Jabal al-Zawiya region, the London-based Syrian Human Rights Organization said. The group did not specify whether the three nonmilitary dead were armed defectors or civilians caught in the fighting.

The Local Coordination Committees activist group had no confirmation of the soldiers’ casualties but said three people died in military operations which were accompanied by intense shooting from heavy machine guns.

Syrian defectors armed mostly with rocket propelled grenades and guns operate mainly around Jabal al-Zawiya and also in the central Syrian region of Homs.
Small-scale military defections have been reported in Syria since early on in the uprising and have increased in the past few weeks.

Riad Asaad, an air force colonel who heads the Free Syrian Army, said Wednesday that the group now has more than 10,000 members.
While analysts doubt the numbers, Asaad was confident more soldiers would soon join his ranks. He spoke from Turkey where he now seeks refuge.

“They will soon discover that armed rebellion is the only way to break the Syrian regime,” he said in the interview. “I call on all the honorable people in the Syrian army to join us so we can liberate our country,” he added.
“It is the only way to get rid of this murderous regime.”