As Reports of Deaths Mount, Syria Observers Urged Toward Homs

As Reports of Deaths Mount, Syria Observers Urged Toward Homs

Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A screen grab released by Agence France-Presse shows a Syrian tank driving through the city of Homs on Monday.
By KAREEM FAHIM

BEIRUT, Lebanon — At least 30 people were killed in fighting in the rebellious Syrian city of Homs on Monday, spurring France to join with residents and opposition figures in urging observers from the Arab League to quickly visit the city.

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What residents described as a multi-day siege of Syria’s third largest city had has left several neighborhoods without food, water or electricity. Videos posted by human rights activists showed bloodied bodies lying in emptied streets, and residential buildings badly scarred by a fierce urban battle.

“The authorities in Damascus must imperatively, in keeping with the Arab League plan, allow the access of observers to the city of Homs,” a spokesman for the French Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

“The repression and unprecedented violence committed by the regime of Damascus must cease,” the statement said.

Fifty observers, from Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia and several other Arab countries, arrived in Syria on Monday night. They are supposed to monitor pledges by President Bashar al-Assad’s government to withdraw its tanks and troops from cities and release political prisoners.

The Arab League said its observers would travel to Homs and several other cities on Tuesday, even as human rights activists questioned how effective the mission would be. Critics have raised doubts about whether the observers can, or will, work independently of the Syrian government, and whether the team has members qualified to make sense of a conflict that looks increasingly like a civil war in which many of the combatants are not wearing uniforms.

The Arab League has still not released a list of the observers, though the names of a few people, including at least two human rights workers, have become public. Concerns have also been raised about the team leader, Lt. Gen. Mohamed al-Dabi, a former head of military intelligence and external security in Sudan.

Wissam Tarif, the Arab world campaigner for Avaaz, which documents protests, said he and other activists had repeatedly asked for biographies of the observers. He said his organization had decided not participate, over concerns that government would be escorting the observers to conflict zones, making it impossible to conduct impartial interviews.

“A rapist can’t be one of the forensic experts examining a victim,” he said.

The observer visit coincides with some of the worst violence in the nine-month uprising, as the army and the security forces have attacked strongholds of resistance, in Homs and near the city of Idlib.

Residents of Homs said the security forces had fired on protesters, but they also spoke of an intensifying war in some neighborhoods, pitting defecting soldiers and other armed revolutionaries against the security forces and the army. Soldiers surrounded neighborhoods and tanks patrolled the streets. The residents, holed up in bathrooms or lower floors for safety, were not able to say where most of the fire was coming from.

The fighting was concentrated in the Bab Amr neighborhood. A resident there, Abu Omar, said hundreds of families had fled and the neighborhood had long ago run out of food, leaving people to survive on potatoes. Several days ago, dozens of army soldiers took over part of his house, firing heavy machine guns from his third floor for days.

“Since yesterday morning the bombing hasn’t stopped,” he said. “I have a headache from these bombs.”

In the city’s Inshaat neighborhood, residents said that the dead included a 60-year old man, who was apparently shot as he walked to a local mosque. Two groups — the Local Coordination Committees and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said that between 30 and 35 people were killed, but their tallies could not be confirmed independently. .

Armed military defectors also seemed to be fighting intensely. A witness quoted by Reuters reported seeing ambulances full of wounded government soldiers over the last few days. Other residents said there was heavy shelling by government forces, but also exchanges of gunfire with armed members of the opposition.

Videos posted by activists on the Internet showed bodies in the rubble of buildings and mortar shells striking apartment buildings. The fighting is the latest trial for Homs, a stronghold of government resistance that has become one of Syria’s most perilous cities. Sectarian murders have left scores of people dead as armed defectors have carved out strongholds in some neighborhoods.

Some of the killings on Monday seemed to underscore the increasingly confused state of the battle in Homs. A 56-year-old woman in the Al-Malaab al-Baladi neighborhood, who gave her name as Nagham, said that on Monday morning, armed men told a taxi driver to stop his car then shot at it when he refused.

The car wound up in a public garden facing the woman’s house. “We don’t know who stopped him,” she said, speculating that the man either could have been an informer stopped by revolutionaries, or man wanted by the security forces. ”We don’t know anything anymore,” she said.

Soon, members of the security forces and rebels were firing at each other, for a “lifetime,” she said.

“We hid in the small bathroom. I swear, I can’t take this anymore,” she said.


Hwaida Saad and an employee of the New York Times contributed reporting from Beirut, and Scott Sayare from Paris.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/world/middleeast/as-reports-of-deaths-mount-syria-observers-urged-toward-homs.html

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