The Red Cross said yesterday it will try to evacuate hundreds of civilians trapped by fierce fighting in and around the restive city of Homs, as violence killed dozens of people across Syria.

The head of the UN Supervision Mission, meanwhile, told the UN Security Council of the intensifying violence in the country but said the nearly 300 unarmed monitors were “morally obliged” to stay. “We are going nowhere,” Major General Robert Mood said after the meeting.

On the political front, Russia resisted Western pleas to help remove Syria’s President Bashar Assad from power despite the escalating hostilities that have battered a UN-backed peace initiative.

“We believe that nobody has the right to decide for other nations who should be in power and who should not,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday after a G20 summit in Mexico.

The US State Department said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would meet her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in Saint Petersburg next week, as the two sides struggle to find a common stance to end the conflict.

Violence yesterday killed at least 61 people, more than a third of them government troops, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, as an activists spoke of a “desperate” situation in and around Homs.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.