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Exclusive: Bashar Al-Assad Cracks the Whip, Commanding Security to Regress to Father's Era!

In a striking development in the domestic policy, "the security apparatuses were given presidential instructions to tighten their grip during the next phase to repress any civil activity, even if it comes to liquidation threat!" said NidaaSyria sources.

Quoting same sources, the security chiefs received the president's directions to possibly make arbitrary arrests and martial law detentions for periods of up to 3 months, even if those authorities had no evidence against them, i.e. none to bring the detainees to justice.

Recently, a group of Syrian activists were arbitrarily arrested and court martially detained without referral to stand trial. One of those was Ma'an 'Aqel, a journalist, who was captured in Ath-Thawra Newspaper building on 22 November 2009. He remained in custody for 3 months until he was released on 22 December 2010, for reasons unexplained!

The move is made at a time where a growing number of detained political activists are brought to justice. Analysts ascribe it to paving the way to Assad's 2nd phase of eliminating all the remaining political and social activism margins once witnessed by his 1st phase when was still in its infancy. Conceivably this drift was heralded by the press gag last year, when a ban was imposed on the distribution of many newspapers accompanied by the Prime Minister's directly accusing journalists of being foreign sides stooges!