No let up in crackdown on anti-government protestors

Syrian president Bashar al-Assad continues his crackdown on opponents on Monday as gunfire is heard in a western suburb of the Syrian capital Damascus. 

Reuters/Handout (

Amid sweeping arrests of regime opponents, more than 300 people have been rounded up in the coastal town of Banias, based on house-to-house searches using lists of suspects.

The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said water, electricity and telephone lines have been cut off in the town in northwestern Syria.

On Sunday, the military said on six soldiers, including three officers, were killed in clashes as the army pursued "armed terrorist groups" in Homs, Banias and around the southern town of Daraa -- three protest hubs.

Among those arrested in Banias were protest leaders and doctors at a hospital which was circled by the military, the Syrian Observatory said in a statement on Sunday.

Judicial authorities, meanwhile, charged prominent dissident and former MP Riad Seif, a 64-year-old who suffers from cancer, with violating a ban on protests, according to his lawyer Khalil Maatuk.