The Syrian government has blocked a Red Cross convoy from delivering badly needed food, medical supplies and blankets to a rebellious neighborhood of Homs cut off by a month-long siege, and activists accused regime troops who overran the shattered district of execution-style killings and a scorched-earth campaign.
Humanitarian conditions in the former rebel stronghold of Baba Amr have been described as catastrophic, with extended power outages, shortages of food and water and no medical care for the sick and wounded.
On Friday, British Prime Minister David Cameron called Homs “a scene of medieval barbarity.”
Photo: Reuters
Syrian state TV showed burned-out and destroyed buildings in Baba Amr, a western neighborhood of Homs, which was covered with a blanket of fresh snow.
Syrian government forces took control of Baba Amr on Thursday after rebels fled the district under constant bombardment that activists said killed hundreds of people since early last month.
The Syrian regime has said it was fighting “armed gangs” in Baba Amr, and had vowed to “cleanse” the neighborhood.
“It is unacceptable that people who have been in need of emergency assistance for weeks have still not received any help,” International Committee of the Red Cross president Jakob Kellenberger said.
The Red Cross said it had received permission from the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Thursday to enter Baba Amr, on the western side of Homs, and a convoy of seven trucks with humanitarian aid was poised to do so, but authorities then blocked their access. There was no explanation from the government about the change.
“We are staying in Homs tonight in the hope of entering Baba Amr in the very near future,” Kellenberger said.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on Syria to give humanitarian workers immediate access to people who desperately need aid.
“The images which we have seen in Syria are atrocious,” Ban said. “It’s totally unacceptable, intolerable. How, as a human being, can you bear this situation?”
UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Valerie Amos has been trying, without success, to get permission from the Syrian government to visit, and Ban said al-Assad’s regime should let her into the country to assess the situation without delay.
British photographer Paul Conroy, who was wounded by shelling in Baba Amr and trapped there for several days until he escaped, told Britain’s Sky News that thousands of people were still in Homs, “living in bombed-out wrecks with children six to a bed, rooms full of people waiting to die.”
He said they had no electricity or water and only meager supplies of food.
“It’s not a war. It’s a massacre — indiscriminate massacre of men, women and children,” he told the broadcaster. “It’s snowing there now and these people can’t make fires.”
Bassel Fouad, a Syrian activist who fled to Lebanon from Baba Amr, said a colleague there told him on Friday that Syrian troops and pro-government gunmen known as shabiha were conducting house-to-house raids.
“The situation is worse than terrible inside Baba Amr,” Fouad said. “Shabiha are entering homes and setting them on fire.”
His colleague said the gunmen lined 10 men up early on Friday and shot them to death in front of a government cooperative that sells subsidized food. Syrian forces were detaining anyone over the age of 14 in the three-story building, he added.
“They begin at the start of a street and enter and search house after house,” he said. “Then they start with another street.”
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also said it had received reports of 10 people slain in front of a co-op and called on the Red Cross team heading to Homs to investigate claims by residents the building is being used a prison. Another group, the Local Coordination Committees, said 14 were killed.
The claims could not be independently verified.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights spokesman Rupert Colville said in Geneva that the agency had received unconfirmed reports of “a particularly grisly set of summary executions” involving 17 people in Baba Amr after government forces entered.
Colville said his office was seeking to confirm the reports and called on both government and rebel forces to refrain from all forms of revenge attacks.
Syria has a fragile mix of ethnic groups including Sunnis, Shiites, Christians and the minority Alawite sect, to which al-Assad and the ruling elite belong. Homs, the country’s third-largest city, has emerged as a key battleground and has seen an alarming rise in sectarian tensions and reprisal killings.
The EU committed itself to document war crimes in Syria to set the stage for a “day of reckoning” for the country’s leadership, in the way that former Yugoslav leaders were tried for war crimes in the 1990s by a special UN tribunal.
EU leaders in Brussels condemned al-Assad’s regime for its nearly yearlong crackdown on an uprising that began with mostly peaceful protests, but has veered toward civil war, with Syrian forces firing heavy artillery against civilians.
The UN has estimated that more than 7,500 people have been killed, while activists put the death toll at more than 8,000.
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