Syrian troops gather near rebel stronghold
BEIRUT – Syrian tanks and troops massed Monday outside the resistance stronghold of Homs for a possible ground assault that one activist warned could unleash a new round of fierce and bloody urban combat even as the Red Cross tried to broker a cease-fire to allow emergency aid in.
A flood of military reinforcements has been a prelude to previous offensives by President Bashar Assad’s regime, which has tried to use its overwhelming firepower to crush an opposition that has been bolstered by defecting soldiers and hardened by 11 months of street battles.
“The human loss is going to be huge if they retake Baba Amr,” said Rami Abdul-Rahman, who heads the Britain-based activist group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said Russia will put forward a proposal at the U.N. Security Council in coming days regarding humanitarian aid to Syria, the Itar-Tass news agency reported.
Russia and China have vetoed two Security Council resolutions backing Arab League plans aimed at ending the conflict and condemning the government crackdown.
The central city of Homs – and in particular the opposition district Baba Amr – has become a critical ground for both sides.
The opposition has lionized it as “Syria’s Misrata” after the Libyan city where rebels fought off a brutal government siege. Assad’s regime wants desperately to erase the embarrassing defiance in Syria’s third-largest city after weeks of shelling, including a barrage of mortars that killed up to 200 people earlier this month. At least nine people were killed in shelling Monday, activists said.
“The massacre in Syria goes on,” said U.S. Sen. John McCain during a visit to Cairo, where he urged Washington and its allies to find way to help arm and equip Syrian rebels.
McCain, a senior member of the Senate Armed Service Committee, said he did not support direct U.S. weapons supplies to Syrian opposition forces, but has suggested the Arab League or others could help bolster the fighting power of the anti-Assad groups. The U.S., he said, could assist with equipment such as medical supplies or global positioning devices.
“For us to sit back and do nothing while people are being slaughtered … is an affront to everything America stands for and believes in,” said McCain, suggesting that the Republicans could seek to make Syria a central campaign issue in this year’s U.S. presidential election.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, on a visit to Mexico on Monday, said a planned meeting in Tunisia at the end of the week “will demonstrate the Assad regime is increasingly isolated and that the brave Syrian people need our support and solidarity.”
Clashes between military rebels and Syrian forces are growing more frequent, and the defectors have managed to take control of small pieces of territory in the north as well as parts of Homs province, Syria’s largest. Increasingly, Syria appears to be careening toward an all-out civil war.
Activists believe Assad may be trying to subdue Homs – an important stronghold for anti-Assad groups – before a planned referendum Sunday on a new constitution. The charter would allow a bigger role for political opposition to challenge Assad’s Baath Party, which has controlled Syria since a 1963 coup.