Beirut: Armed forces loyal to President Bashar Al Assad barraged residential buildings with mortars and machine-gun fire, killing at least 30 people, including a family of women and children during a day of sectarian killings and kidnappings in the besieged Syrian city of Homs, activists said yesterday.
The violence erupted on Thursday, but important details were only emerging a day later. Video posted online by activists showed the bodies of five small children, five women of varying ages and a man, all bloodied and piled on beds in what appeared to be an apartment after a building was hit in the Karm Al Zaytoun neighbourhood of the city. A narrator said an entire family had been ‘slaughtered'.
The video could not be independently verified.
Heavy gunfire erupted for a second day yesterday in the city, which has seen some of the heaviest violence of the ten-month-old uprising against Al Assad's rule. Activists said at least ten people were killed across the country, four of them in Homs.
Elsewhere, a car bomb exploded yesterday at a checkpoint outside the northern city of Idlib, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, citing witnesses on the ground. The number of casualties was not immediately clear.
‘Terrifying'
The UN says at least 5,400 people have been killed in the government crackdown since March, and the turmoil has intensified as dissident soldiers have joined the ranks of the anti-Al Assad protesters and carried out attacks on regime forces.
Details of Thursday's wave of killings in Homs were emerging from an array of residents and activists yesterday, though they said they were having difficulty because of continuing gunfire.
"There has been a terrifying massacre," Rami Abdul Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told the AP yesterday, calling for an independent investigation of Thursday's killings.
Thursday started with a spate of sectarian kidnappings and killings between the city's population of Sunnis and Allawites, a Shiite sect to which Al Assad belongs and which is the backbone of his regime, said Mohammad Saleh, a centrist opposition figure and activist resident of Homs.
There were also a string of attacks by unknown gunmen on army checkpoints, Saleh said. Checkpoints are a frequent target of dissident troops who have joined the opposition.
The violence culminated with the evening killing of the family, Saleh said, adding that the full details of what happened were not yet clear.
The Observatory said 29 people were killed, including eight children, when a building came under heavy mortar and machine gun fire. Some residents spoke of another massacre that took place when shabiha — armed regime loyalists — stormed the district, slaughtering residents in an apartment, including children.
"It's racial cleansing," said one Sunni resident of Karm Al Zaytoun, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. "They are killing people because of their sect," he said.
Some residents said kidnappers were holding Alawites in the building hit by mortars and gunfire in Karm Al Zaytoun, but the reports could not be confirmed.
Thursday's death toll in Homs city was at least 35, said the Observatory and the Local Coordination Committees, an umbrella group of activists.
‘We cannot support a UN resolution'
Russia will not support any UN Security Council resolution demanding Syrian President Bashar Al Assad resign, a senior Russian diplomat was quoted as saying yesterday.
He stopped short of saying Moscow would veto a Western-Arab draft if the call for Al Assad to step aside was not removed. "Any decision about a future political settlement in Syria must be made during the political process without... preliminary conditions, and the demand for Al Assad's resignation is a preliminary condition," Interfax news agency quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov as saying. "We cannot support a call to support Al Assad's departure in any UN Security Council resolution."
