Damascus incident sparks protests

An altercation between a young man and a traffic policeman led to a large protest demonstration in the Hariqa district of central Damascus, the capital, on February 17th, prompting the interior minister, Said Sammour, to become personally involved in efforts to calm the situation. The incident and the government response reflect the high state of tension across the Middle East in the wake of the overthrow of the presidents of Tunisia and Egypt and the mass protests in Bahrain, Yemen and Libya. The Syrian authorities are likely to have been particularly mindful of the chain of events in Tunisia, in which an incident when one young man, Mohammed Bouazizi, was oppressed and humiliated by police and municipal officials led ultimately to the unseating of the president.

According to an account pieced together by Syria News, a local online news service, on February 20th, the young man, identified as Imad Nasr, had been about to get into his car when a traffic policeman shouted abuse at him ("Get a move on you donkey," according to one witness), which provoked an angry response. The policeman was then reported to have approached the man and hit him, before dragging him to the entrance of a building and continuing with the beating with the help of fellow officers. The incident was recorded on a mobile phone and the video circulated on the Internet, and within a short time several hundred people had gathered in the area shouting angry slogans against the police and affirming that "the Syrian people will not be humiliated". Appeals from the chief of police for this part of Damascus for the crowd to disperse had no effect. However, the crowd did finally agree to disperse when the interior minister arrived with Mr Nasr and announced that there would be a full investigation into the behaviour of the police.

Some accounts of the incident spoke of chants in support of Mr Assad, suggesting that the president's personal popularity provides him with a measure of immunity against the resentment of much of the population at the repressive nature of the Baathist regime, which has maintained emergency detention laws since the party came to power in 1963.