Jordan's Muslim Brotherhood Asks Assad to Stop Violence in Syria

By Nayla Razzouk - Apr 27, 2011

Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood urged Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to stop using force against protesters and to listen to their pro-democracy demands.

“We strongly condemn the use of violence that has left hundreds of martyrs and injured people among the heroic Syrian protesters,” it said in a statement posted on its website. “We ask the Syrian president to respond to the demands of the people for real and serious political reform.” The Syrian regime should “stop monopolizing power in the hand of a single party and one group and move toward a multiparty political system.”

Syria’s government has deployed tanks in cities where rallies have continued to take place and clashes have left hundreds of people dead and scores detained, according to rights groups including Human Rights Watch.

The regime has accused “terrorist gangs,” Islamists and foreign forces that it didn’t identify of seeking to destabilize the rule of the secular Baath party. Government officials and the state-run media say Syria has been targeted because of its anti-Israel stand.

Syrian officials have accused local “armed gangs” of receiving foreign weapons and money from places such as near the flash-point southern city of Daraa, close to the Jordanian border. While Jordanian officials said yesterday that Syria had shut their common border crossings, the Syrian government and foreign reporters on the Jordanian side said the crossings were open, though vehicles rarely venture into the area.

In 1982, Assad’s father, then-President Hafez al-Assad, crushed a rebellion led by Sunni Muslim militants in the city of Hama, killing as many as 10,000 people, according to estimates cited by Human Rights Watch. The current outbreak of unrest is the most serious since then.

Source: Bloomberg.
Link: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-27/jordan-s-muslim-brotherhood-asks-assad-to-stop-violence-in-syria.html.