BEIRUT - Syrian troops and tanks swept into the northern coastal town of Baniyas on Saturday to suppress anti-government demonstrations, tightening the squeeze on a persistent yet largely leaderless opposition movement that has refused to stop staging protests despite a deadly military crackdown.
Human-rights groups said three women were shot dead in a village outside Baniyas when they joined a demonstration to protest the army's actions, but that otherwise land lines and cellphone services to the town were cut off and no information was emerging from there.
At least 25 tanks rolled into the town about 2 a.m., according to rights groups and a witness who said soldiers were shooting into the air as they advanced through the darkened streets.
Residents later formed a human chain to try to keep the soldiers away, according to Wissam Tarif of the rights group Insan.
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Baniyas, which has emerged as a key protest town, was surrounded by the military and effectively placed under siege a month ago.
Soldiers refused to allow supplies in and detained people who tried to leave, but otherwise they had made no attempt in the past two weeks to enter or to prevent the daily demonstrations in the town, according to residents contacted before Saturday's clampdown.
The push into Baniyas, on the northern Mediterranean coast, appeared to replicate a similar assault nearly two weeks ago in the far southern city of Daraa, where the protest movement started, signaling that President Bashar Assad's government remains intent on crushing by force the uprising that has erupted in recent weeks in almost every corner of the country.
But Syrians have continued to respond to activists' calls for weekly protests after Friday prayers. This past Friday, tens of thousands of people turned out nationwide. On Saturday, Tarif said that the number of protesters killed by security forces the day before had climbed to 40, with 17 of them in the city of Homs, north of Damascus.
Tarif said activists in Homs had told him that at least nine soldiers defected Friday, and Syrian state television has reported that 11 members of the security forces were killed in Homs on Friday.
But Saturday, communications were cut to Homs, as well as to the Damascus suburb of Zabadani, making it impossible to establish what was happening in those locations and suggesting the government was also escalating its clampdown against opponents there, Tarif said.
In other developments Saturday:
• Yemen: One demonstrator was killed and 11 injured in a southern town when police descended on thousands rallying for the ouster of Yemen's longtime president, an activist said.
Nouh al-Wafi said police fired tear gas and live ammunition to disperse protesters in the town of al-Maafir in Taiz province. The demonstrators were mainly students but were joined later by other residents.
In several other cities - including Aden, Saada and Hodeida - protesters observed a one-day shutdown of offices and businesses as part of the civil disobedience campaign called by the opposition to pressure President Ali Abdullah Saleh to step down.
• Tunisia: A leading human-rights lawyer said a Tunis court convicted a nephew of Leila Trabelsi, Tunisia's widely reviled former first lady, on drug consumption charges.
Imad Trabelsi was fined and sentenced to two years in prison, according to Mokhtar Trifi, president of the Tunisian League of Human Rights.
The conviction was the second of a member of former President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's extended family since he fled Tunisia in January amid huge street protests that sparked similar uprisings across the Arab world.
