Syrian President Bashar al-Assad replaced his ailing defense minister on Monday in the context of recent shake-up covering a number of officials, the official SANA news agency reported.

Al-Assad has named Lt. Gen. Dawoud Bin Abdullah Rajha as the new defense minister replacing Ali Habib, said SANA, adding that the replacement came following a number of meetings with popular delegations and citizens.

Habib, 72, named as defense minister in 2009, was removed due to deteriorating health situation, said SANA.

Rajha, 64, a military college graduate, was head of a number of administrations and bodies of the armed forces before being appointed as deputy chief of staff in 2004. In 2009, he was named as the army's chief of staff.

Meanwhile, a military source said army units, entitled to bring back life to normalcy in the restive province of Hama in central Syria, have started evacuating the city after they "fulfilled a qualitative mission" there by protecting the lives of residents and tracking down armed and terrorist groups, which have brought life there to a standstill and committed a lot of sabotaging acts.

The army units had confronted those groups "precisely and with high profession" and arrested a number of terrorists, the source added, noting that life in the city is back to normalcy.

Funerals were held Monday for seven policemen and security agents, whom SANA said were killed recently by armed and terrorist groups at the central province of Homs and the southern city of Daraa.

Syrian authorities blamed the violence during the almost five- month-old unrest on armed thugs and ultraconservative Muslims who want to establish Islamic emirates nationwide and pledged that there would be no letup in its crackdown on those gunmen to restore stability and security to the country.