Syrian ground troops attacked a rebel-held district of Homs yesterday after shelling it for 26 straight days, as world pressure grew for humanitarian access to besieged protest cities.
A security source said in Damascus that Baba Amr “is under control,” after activists had earlier said troops of the elite Fourth Armoured Division had taken up positions around the holdout district of Syria’s third-largest city.
“The army has started combing the area building by building and house by house. Now the troops are searching every basement and tunnel for arms and terrorists,” the security source said, adding that “There remain only few pockets” of resistance.
But a human rights watchdog and activists in the central city denied that troops had moved into Baba Amr, insisting that clashes were taking place only on its outskirts.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights insisted that rebel forces were “preventing an attempt to storm” Baba Amr.
Homs-based activist Hadi Abdullah reported clashes and heavy shelling of Baba Amr but insisted that ground troops had not entered the neighbourhood.
“Regime forces did not enter Baba Amr until this moment. They are surrounding the district, while clashes are concentrated in the neighbourhoods of Inshaat and Malaab,” he said by telephone.
Rebels would ‘defend to the last man’
Mr Abdullah said activists were “evacuating families because shelling has been targeting places that were considered safe in the past.”
The arrival of the Fourth Armoured Division, which is under the command of President Bashar al-Assad’s brother, Maher, was a likely prelude to a final assault, he added.
Another Homs-based activist, who goes by the pseudonym Abu Atta al-Homsi, dismissed in a telephone call with AFP the claims of advances by regime forces into Baba Amr as mere “rumours aimed at spreading fear.”
He insisted that the rebels would “defend to the last man.”
Rebel commanders said access to Homs was now completely blocked after regular troops blew up an underground aqueduct that had been the last viable route for smuggling of desperately needed supplies.
Efforts to bring out Le Figaro journalist Edith Bouvier, who is trapped inside Baba Amr with multiple fractures, intensified after her British colleague Paul Conroy was successfully smuggled out to Lebanon on Monday night.
Thirteen Syrian activists were killed trying to help Bouvier and Conroy and to bring in aid to Baba Amr, international activist group Avaaz said.
Another journalist who had been trapped in Homs, Spanish correspondent Javier Espinosa, has arrived in Lebanon from Syria, his employer the El Mundo newspaper said yesterday.