AMMAN: Syrian tanks bombarded opposition areas in Homs overnight and the Red Cross tried for a sixth day to gain access to Baba Amr, a fallen rebel stronghold where activists have reported bloody reprisals by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.
President Barack Obama said it was only a matter of time before Assad left office, describing Syria’s turmoil as ‘heartbreaking and outrageous’, but opposed a call by a senior US senator for American military action to force him out.
No independent witnesses have been allowed into Baba Amr since troops retook it on Friday after a four-week siege, increasing concern about the fate of about 4,000 civilians estimated to have remained in the shattered neighbourhood.
Local opposition activists said troops and pro-Assad militiamen occupying Baba Amr had killed seven males, including a 10-year-old, from the Berini family with knives. ‘They were stabbed to death on Tuesday. Their bodies were dumped in farmland next to Baba Amr,’ Mohammed al-Homsi told Reuters.
Syria imposes severe media restrictions, making such reports hard to verify, although the United Nations has compiled evidence of abuses it says amount to crimes against humanity.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said an aid convoy destined for Baba Amr had been awaiting permission to enter since Friday. ‘We have not made it in,’ the ICRC’s Damascus-based spokesman Saleh Dabbakeh said.
The world has found no way to halt a year of bloodshed since many Syrians rose against Assad in what has proved the longest and bloodiest of Arab revolts against entrenched rulers.
At the United Nations, the five permanent Security Council members and Morocco met on Tuesday to discuss a US-drafted resolution urging an end to the Syrian government’s crackdown on demonstrators, a text some Western envoys said was too weak. Russia and China, adamantly opposed to any Libya-style intervention in Syria, have vetoed two previous draft measures that would have condemned Damascus and it is not clear whether the latest one stands any chance of success.
According to a text seen by Reuters, the US draft demands ‘unhindered humanitarian access’ and ‘condemns the continued widespread, systematic, and gross violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms by the Syrian authorities’. (Reuters)
