BEIRUT: The Syrian government kept up its onslaught on Homs and other towns, with at least 100 killed according to human rights campaigners, as the country prepared to hold a referendum on Sunday on a new constitution.
‘No one is going to vote,’ activist Omar, speaking by Skype from the rebel-held Baba Amro district of Homs, said in advance of the referendum staged by President Bashar al-Assad’s government.
‘This was a constitution made to Bashar’s tastes and meanwhile we are getting shelled and killed,’ he added. ‘More than 40 people were killed on Sunday and you want us to vote in a referendum? … No one is going to vote.’
Forces loyal to Assad killed at least 100 people in Syria on Saturday in a fourth week of bombardments on the central city of Homs and assaults on towns and villages in northern and southern provinces, the Syrian Network for Human Rights said. Six women and 10 children were among those killed, the opposition activists’ organisation, which documents what it describes as killings by loyalist forces, said in a statement.
It added that the dead included 44 people in Homs and the surrounding countryside, which has been under sustained shelling for more than three weeks. In Homs, loyalist troops bombarded Sunni Muslim districts, with opposition activists reporting mortar rounds and anti-aircraft fire hitting Old Homs and the districts of Baba Amro, Bab Sbaa and Bab Dreib.Khalidiya, a neighbourhood inhabited by members of Sunni tribes from the Syriac desert east of Homs, also was hit, they said. Thousands of people in Khalidiya turned up on Saturday for the funerals of at least 17 people killed in the bombardment, according to YouTube footage uploaded by activists. Another YouTube video showed Mohammad al-Mohammad, a doctor at a makeshift hospital in Baba Amro, holding a 15-year-old boy hit in the neck by shrapnel and spitting blood.
‘It is late at night and Baba Amro is still being bombarded. We can do nothing for this boy,’ said the doctor. (UNI)