Red Cross bids to deliver Syria aid

Syrian forces launched a fresh assault on Homs today as the Red Cross pressed forward with efforts to deliver badly needed aid to thousands of people stranded in a besieged neighbourhood despite warnings from regime troops of land mines and booby traps.

Two days after they fought their way into the rebel stronghold of Baba Amr, government forces shelled several other neighbourhoods of the city, the country’s third largest with about one million people.

They included districts where many of Baba Amr’s residents had fled, activists said.

The Syrian regime has said it was fighting “armed gangs” in Baba Amr, which has become a symbol of the nearly year-old uprising against President Bashar Assad’s authoritarian rule. The revolt has killed more than 7,500 people, according to the UN.

The Local Coordination Committees activist network said mortars slammed into the districts of Khaldiyeh, Bab Sbaa and Khader.

Abu Hassan al-Homsi, a doctor at a makeshift clinic in Khaldiyeh, said he treated a dozen people who were wounded.

“This has become routine, the mortars start falling early in the morning,” he said. Several homes were damaged from the morning shelling.

Another Khaldiyeh resident who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals said the district has been without water and heating fuel for a week amid freezing temperatures and snow.

“We are collecting rain and snow water, and cutting trees to burn to warm ourselves,” he said.

Conditions in Baba Amr are believed to be dire, with extended power outages, shortages of food and water, and lack of medical care. Syrian government forces took control of the neighbourhood on Thursday after rebels fled the district under constant bombardment that activists said had killed hundreds of people since early February.

The Red Cross said the regime blocked its entry to Baba Amr yesterday, one day after the group received government permission to enter with a convoy of seven trucks carrying 15 tons of humanitarian aid including food, medical supplies and blankets.

“We are still in negotiations to enter Baba Amr,” ICRC spokesman Hicham Hassan said today in Geneva.

The Syrians said they were not letting the Red Cross into Baba Amr because of safety concerns, including land mines, Mr Hassan said, adding the organisation had not been able to verify the danger. The government has not offered an official explanation.

“It’s important that we get in today,” Mr Hassan said. “We are not about to give up.”

There was no immediate word on what was going on in Baba Amr on today, a day after activists accused regime forces of execution-style killings and a scorched earth campaign of burning homes, raising fears of revenge attacks in a country on the verge of civil war.

Telephone and internet lines were still down and activists in nearby areas said they had no information from inside.

In the northern Idlib province, cemetery workers were burying people in parks because the graveyards were targets for regime forces, residents said.

“They (the Syrian army) don’t let us pass the checkpoint to get to the cemetery over there, they don’t let us dig graves over there. So we have to dig graves in the park,” Idlib cemetery worker Issam Abbas told The Associated Press.

In other violence, a suicide car bomb exploded in Daraa, killing at least two people and wounding 20, activists said. The state-run news agency said the blast occurred at a roundabout in an area known as Daraa al-Balad and said there were casualties including civilians and security forces.

It blamed “terrorists” for the attack. But residents taking part in the funeral of the two blamed the regime. “They were killed by an explosion prepared by the Assad gang,” a banner read.