Syrian Freedom

Lone survivor’s horrific account of latest alleged massacre at hands of #Syria regime

Mahmoud, a 21-year-old Palestinian resident of Syria, rests in a field hospital after he was found, Aug. 6, 2012, having been blindfolded, beaten and sprayed with bullets. (AP)

07/08/2012

(AP) ANADAN, Syria — The guards pulled him from his cell before dawn on Monday, bound his hands, blindfolded him and drove him to an empty lot in the Syrian city of Aleppo. They sat him in a row with 10 other captives, he said, then cocked their guns and opened fire.

“They sprayed us,” recalled 21-year-old Mahmoud, the lone survivor of the latest mass killing of Syria’s civil war. “The first bullet hit my chest, then one hit my foot, then my head. As soon as my head got hit, I thought, `I’m dead.”’

Reports of such killings have surfaced frequently during the 17 months of deadly violence that activists seeking to topple President Bashar Assad say has killed more than 19,000 people. But details are usually scarce — no more than activist reports or amateur videos of bloodied bodies or mass graves posted on YouTube.

Mahmoud related his grisly ordeal to The Associated Press hours after it happened. Struggling to speak, he lay in a bed in a makeshift rebel-run field hospital set up in a wedding hall in this town 13 miles north of Aleppo. Bandages covered his foot, head and chest. Plastic vines and colored lights adorned the walls of the darkened building, and two red velvet chairs once used by brides and grooms sat on a small stage.

Mahmoud gave only his first name to protect his family who still live in the area.

While his story could not be independently confirmed, Mahmoud’s wounds matched his story and residents who found him and his dead colleagues corroborated certain details.

Together, they painted a picture of the summary slaying of 10 men, at least some of whom had only loose links to the armed rebels seeking to topple the regime. That story jibes with activist claims of the increasingly brutal tactics regime forces are using to try to crush the rebellion that has spread to Aleppo, Syria’s largest city.

Syria’s uprising started in March 2011 with peaceful protests calling for political reforms that were met with a fierce regime crackdown. Government brutality grew as dissent spread, and many in the opposition took up arms as the conflict morphed into a civil war.

Aleppo has been a stronghold of government support throughout the uprising, with a wealthy business class and many minority communities who fear they’ll suffer if Assad falls. Until recently, the city of some 4 million people had been spared the violence that has ravaged other Syrian cities.

But during the last two weeks, rebels have been pushing into Aleppo’s neighborhoods, clashing with security forces and torching police stations in a push to “liberate” the city. Syrian media has vowed the army is gearing up for a “decisive battle,” while anti-regime activists have reported swelling numbers of troops and tanks on the city’s edges.

The Syrian government blames the uprising on armed gangs and terrorists backed by foreign powers that seek to weaken Syria.

Mahmoud receives treatment in a field hospital after he was found Aug. 6, 2012, with three gunshot wounds in the town of Anadan

(Credit: AP)

It was amid these tensions that Mahmoud, a Palestinian resident of Aleppo, had his fateful brush with Syrian security. On Thursday, Mahmoud said, he and a friend went to collect their paychecks from the thread factory where they work and heard clashes nearby. Soon eight men in civilian clothes stopped them and asked for their IDs and cell phones.

On Mahmoud’s phone they found videos of anti-government demonstrations and messages he sent to rebels from the Free Syrian Army, asking God to protect them and make them victorious. The men threw Mahmoud and his friend in the trunk of a car and drove them to a trash dump, where they were blindfolded, bound and beaten with sticks and large rocks before being taken to a security office.

Mahmoud was locked in a crowded cell with about a dozen other men, he said. Each day, some were taken out and new ones brought in.

“We were there for four days and they only gave us water to drink once. They never fed us,” he said. “They never asked us anything. Every day it was beating, beating, beating.”

Before dawn on Monday, guards pulled Mahmoud and 10 others from their cells and told they were going to see a judge. They were bound at the wrists, blindfolded and driven to Aleppo’s Khaldiyeh neighborhood, where they were lined up on a patch of rocky soil.

“They sat us all down next to each other, `You here, you here, you here,”’ Mahmoud said. “Then each one cocked his weapon and the shooting started.”

Mahmoud was shot three times. Bullets pierced his chest and foot and one grazed his skull. Minutes later, silence returned, and he realized he was still alive.

“I breathed, I said the shehada,” he said, referring to the Muslim declaration of faith meant to put him right with God. “I tried to get up then started screaming because blood was coming out of me.”

He scraped his face on a rock to remove the blindfold and crawled to where some nearby residents found him.

Among them was a 22-year-old electrician who said he heard the gunfire early Monday and worried that people were being killed because he had discovered six bodies in the same spot a day earlier. He showed videos of the victims on his cell phone, their bodies piled atop each other covered in blood, some bearing large bruises that appeared to be from beatings. He said all had been shot dead.

He and others asked not to have their names published because they have to pass through government checkpoints to get home.

The killings shocked residents of Khaldiyeh, a working-class neighborhood on Aleppo’s northwest side that has seen little violence until now. While many residents support the rebels, they have not established a foothold in the area, and the relative quiet has drawn thousands of people fleeing violence in other Aleppo neighborhoods or nearby villages.

As Mahmoud spoke, a white pickup pulled up outside the field hospital with the bodies of nine of the men killed Monday. The body of the tenth victim had been taken away by his family. All still had their hands bound and two still wore blindfolds. Two had bullet wounds to their heads, and others had blood on their faces and chests or coming out of their ears. None wore shoes.

Those killings convinced one Khaldiyeh resident who helped collect the bodies that the neighborhood needs arms.

“We want the Free Army to come to our neighborhood to protect us,” he said. “If they can’t come, then they need to give us weapons so we can defend ourselves.”

The field hospital’s doctor, Mohammed Ajaj, said he is no longer shocked when the dead and wounded pass through town on their way to burial in nearby villages or for treatment across the northern border in Turkey.

“We’ve gotten used to it,” he said.

An 18-year-old activist who helped collect the bodies said none of them had IDs.

“We really know nothing about them,” he said, adding that he would stop in neighboring villages to see if anyone recognized them before delivering them to a morgue further north.

“If nobody claims them, we’ll take their photos and put them on our Facebook page so their families can find out that they’re dead,” he said.

EXTREMELY GRAPHIC | Homs, #Syria: Khalidiyeh bodies lie in the streets after they were killed and burned 18/4/2012

Analysis: U.N. mission does nothing to change endgame in #Syria

By Tim Lister, CNN

April 17, 2012 — Updated 1605 GMT (0005 HKT)

(CNN) — The beginning of the U.N. observer mission to Syria heralds a new phase in more than a year of upheaval across the country. Success, however unlikely, could open the door to some form of dialogue between the regime and its opponents. But such is the polarization in Syria that most analysts see the mission as the least worst option before violence sets the agenda again.

It’s not as though any “cessation of violence” has yet taken hold. The ceasefire was meant to begin last Thursday, but in the past few days the regime has continued to shell restive city neighborhoods, according to opposition activists and U.N. officials. U.N. human rights officials reported Monday “the shelling of the Khalidiya neighborhood and other districts in Homs by government forces and the use of heavy weaponry, such as machine-guns in other areas, including Idlib and some suburbs of Damascus.”

One of the most important parts of the plan devised by Kofi Annan is that tanks, troops and heavy weapons be withdrawn from populated areas, but this has clearly not happened.

Monitoring missions can only work when the parties to a conflict have had enough of fighting or can be coerced into negotiation by outside powers. The Arab League mission members in Syria earlier this year were little more than bystanders, unable or unwilling to operate amid the government crackdown.

Twenty years ago, the U.N. agreed to deploy a mission to monitor a ceasefire in Sarajevo, the besieged capital of Bosnia. But the ceasefire never took hold as both Serbs and Muslims quarreled over its terms. Aid convoys were attacked and looted as U.N. monitors looked on.

By the middle of 1992, more than a million Bosnians were homeless, similar to the number of Syrians displaced today. Despite the subsequent expansion of the U.N. presence in Bosnia, there was no mandate for more forceful intervention until the Srebrenica massacre — more than three years after the conflict began.

The parallels are not exact but “there is a certain deja vu quality” to events in Syria, admits Ahmad Fawzi, spokesman for Annan.

“The United States is leaving it in the hands of Kofi Annan, as is the rest of the world,” Fawzi told McClatchy newspapers. “We’re the only path in town. There is no alternative.” That in itself illustrates how few options there are for the West to influence events in Syria.

It seems that both Russia and the United States are already preparing for the mission’s failure. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Tuesday that some foreign powers hoped to scupper the Annan plan by smuggling weapons to the rebels, while U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice says that regime infractions “will call into question the wisdom and the viability of sending in the full monitoring presence.”

Even the terms of the U.N. monitors are still a matter of dispute. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said Monday that the government must guarantee freedom of access. The monitors “should be allowed to freely move to any places where they will be able to observe this cessation of violence,” he said.

The government has made it clear that the observers won’t have free rein and it “will be involved in all steps on the ground.” It’s also demanding that rebels lay down their weapons, which one opposition activist said was like telling them to write a suicide note.

Even 250 monitors — the maximum currently envisaged — would be hard pressed to cover all Syria’s hotspots, as Ban himself acknowledged Tuesday.

If it took hold, the presence of U.N. observers might, ironically, provide a respite for both sides. Syria’s military has seen a year of relentless operations (and growing defections). The Syrian Free Army has been on the back foot, short of weapons and training. One FSA commander acknowledged he was preparing for the next stage on the assumption the Annan mission would fail.

According to Annan’s six-point plan, the Syrian government would have to make significant concessions — allowing the international media into the country, releasing detainees and allowing peaceful protest. It has shown no sign of making such concessions. The protest movement has endured for months despite arbitrary killings, detention and torture. In a state renowned for its secret police, the shackles of fear were broken and cannot be clamped on again. So for the regime to give free rein to protest would be tantamount to giving up control of sizable cities like Homs, Hama and Idlib. In such places Local Coordination Committees set up by the opposition have already become mini-governments, organizing food deliveries, providing shelter, settling disputes. In addition, the size of an international humanitarian aid effort also mandated by U.N. resolution would de facto deprive the regime of the control it has struggled to reassert.

The arrival of the U.N. monitors does nothing to change the endgame in Syria, which is essentially about the survival of the al-Assad regime. Russia and al-Assad’s ally, Iran, apparently believe that Syria can weather the storm; Europe, Turkey and the United States that it is ultimately doomed. The Syrian government appears to have calculated that by accepting if not adhering to the U.N. plan — for now — it can alleviate the pressure on it, and that its concessions won’t tip the balance toward its opponents, who are disorganized, divided and lack the weapons to challenge the security apparatus.

Also in the regime’s calculations, presumably, is that even if it has to resort to plan A, bludgeoning the revolt, the international community is too divided to contemplate military action. The International Crisis Group noted last week: “The West remains confused and ambivalent, having exhausted all sources of diplomatic and economic leverage, fearful of the future and tiptoeing around the question of military options.”

Qatar and Saudi Arabia have spoken of arming the opposition, but have not followed through with the sort of hardware and cash that made a difference on the battlefield in Libya.

Looming over the tactical considerations of all sides is the very real damage done to the Syrian economy and people, with the U.N. estimating at least 1 million people displaced internally (not least because sectarian animosities have grown.) Nearly 100,000 Syrians have taken refuge in Jordan. Across the border with Turkey, the refugee camps are taking on a permanent air. Few of the thousands who fled expect to go home anytime soon, and the Obama administration continues to study a buffer zone on the Syria-Turkey border.

If the al-Assad dynasty is to survive, it will need a massive infusion of aid to repair infrastructure and revive an economy in freefall. Defectors have told CNN that government spending has largely been diverted to the military and the feared regime militia; there are shortages of gasoline and electricity. The value of the Syrian pound has halved and a shortage of hard currency is making imports difficult to finance. Reuters quotes French diplomatic sources as estimating Tuesday that Syria’s hard currency reserves have dropped 50% in a year as sanctions have hurt the banking sector and the oil industry. In the long-term, against a background of hyperinflation and shortages, economic implosion may be the Syrian state’s greatest threat.

But does the government have the will or capacity to repair the damage and deliver economic recovery? And would anyone help it do so?

Not while it’s locked in a polarizing war of attrition, characterized by the massacre of entire families and bubbling sectarian hatred. As the International Crisis Group observed last week: “The fact is that the regime’s behavior has fueled extremists on both sides, and, by allowing the country’s slide into chaos, provided them space to move in and operate.”

To most commentators, 250 blue berets are unlikely to reverse that dynamic.

UN rights experts report violations since #Syria truce

Mon Apr 16, 2012 11:18am EDT

* Team reports abuses by both sides since ceasefire took hold

* Shelling and arrests by Syrian forces; executions by rebels

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA, April 16 (Reuters) - U.N. human rights investigators said on Monday they had received reports of shelling and arrests by Syrian forces since the ceasefire, as well as executions of some soldiers captured by rebels, although the level of violence generally was lower.

The team led by Brazilian expert Paulo Pinheiro said it hoped the truce brokered by international mediator Kofi Annan last week would hold and help put an end to gross human rights violations that it has documented over the past six months.

In a statement, it also voiced concern at what it called the “deteriorating humanitarian situation” in Syria where tens of thousands of civilians fled escalating fighting in the run-up to the fragile ceasefire that took effect last week.

It acknowledged generally lower levels of violence in some areas, but was seriously concerned over accounts of a number of incidents since the truce.

These included “the shelling of the Khaldieh neighbourhood and other districts in Homs by government forces and the use of heavy weaponry, such as machineguns in other areas, including Idlib and some suburbs of Damascus.

“The commission is also concerned by reports of new arrests, especially in Hama and Aleppo,” it said.

The team, which reports to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, has not been allowed into Syria, but has interviewed refugees and gathered testimony in neighbouring countries.

“The Commission also continued to receive reports of human rights abuses committed by anti-government armed groups engaged in fighting against the Syrian army during and after the ceasefire, including extra-judicial killings of soldiers captured during armed confrontations,” it said.

A handful of soldiers in blue caps put a tentative United Nations presence at the heart of the Syrian crisis on Monday, predicting success for their mission to stabilise a shaky four-day-old ceasefire even as shells continued to fall.

In their last report issued on Feb. 23, the U.N. investigators said that they had evidence that Syrian forces had committed crimes against humanity including murder, abductions and torture under orders from the “highest level” of army and government officials.

@UN #Syria: Powerful explosions in Khalidiyeh, Homs by the Assad Army on 15/04/2012 from the shelling

Unidentified martyr killed by Assad’s shelling in Khalidiyeh, Homs #Syria @UN 16/4/2012

A building on fire caused by Assad’s indiscriminate shelling in Khalidiyeh, Homs #Syria @UN 16/4/2012

Salem Al Dumani was killed by shelling from Assad’s army in Khalidiyeh, Homs #Syria @UN 16/4/2012

Shelling in #Syria as U.N. Monitors Begin Work

Associated Press

BEIRUT—An advance team of U.N. observers on Monday was working with Syrian officials on the ground rules for monitoring the country’s 5-day old cease-fire, which appeared to be rapidly unraveling Monday as regime forces pounded the opposition stronghold of Homs with artillery shells and mortars, activists said.

Even though the overall level of violence across Syria has dropped significantly, government attacks over the weekend raised new doubts about President Bashar al-Assad’s commitment to special envoy Kofi Annan’s plan to end 13 months of violence and launch talks on the country’s political future.

The advance team of six U.N. monitors arrived in Damascus Sunday night. Mr. Annan’s spokesman Ahmad Fawzi said the team, led by Moroccan Col. Ahmed Himmiche, met Monday with Syrian Foreign Ministry officials to discuss ground rules, including what freedom of movement the observers would have.

Mr. Fawzi said the remaining 25 observers are expected to arrive in the coming days. He said in a statement issued in Geneva on Monday that the mission “will start with setting up operating headquarters, and reaching out to the Syrian government and the opposition forces so that both sides fully understand the role of the UN observers.”

“We will start our mission as soon as possible and we hope it will be a success,” Col. Himmiche told the Associated Press as he left a Damascus hotel along with his team Monday morning.

Two activist groups, the Local Coordination Committees and the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said intense shelling of Homs resumed early Monday for the third consecutive day.

“Government forces trying to take control of Homs neighborhoods are pounding the districts of Khaldiyeh and Bayada with mortar fire,” the Observatory said.

Both groups said two people were killed in Hama in central Syria on Monday when security forces opened fire on their car.

Western countries and the Syrian opposition are skeptical Mr. Assad will abide by Mr. Annan’s six-point plan for a cease-fire and the weekend pounding of Homs along with scattered violence in other areas has reinforced those doubts.

Mr. Assad accepted the truce deal at the prodding of his main ally, Russia, but his compliance has been limited. He has halted shelling of rebel-held neighborhoods, with the exception of Homs, but ignored calls to pull troops out of urban centers, apparently for fear of losing control over a country his family has ruled for four decades. Rebel fighters have also kept up attacks, including shooting ambushes.

Syria’s state-run newspaper Tishrin said Monday that Damascus is “satisfied” with the U.N. resolution to send observers to the country because it respects Syrian sovereignty. The paper added that the resolution says all parties were responsible for halting violence. “This is a clear-cut international recognition of the crimes and assaults committed by armed groups,” it said.

The international community hopes U.N. observers will be able to stabilize the cease-fire, which formally took effect Thursday. The U.N. Security Council approved the observer mission unanimously on Saturday. A larger team of 250 observers requires more negotiations between the U.N. and the Syrian government next week.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed serious concern over the Syrian government’s continued shelling of Homs and said “the whole world is watching with skeptical eyes” whether the cease-fire can be sustained.

“It is important—absolutely important that the Syrian government should take all the measures to keep this cessation of violence,” he told reporters in Brussels after meeting Belgian Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo on Sunday.

Mr. Ban said he hoped that once the full monitoring team is on the ground “there will be calm and stability and peace without any violence.”

Since the cease-fire began, each side has accused the other of violations.

Syria’s state-run news agency SANA has reported rebel attacks targeting checkpoints and army officers, while opposition activists said regime troops and their allied shabiha militiamen continued arrest raids and mistreatment of those in detention.

Also Monday, a Hamas official said a senior member of the Palestinian group, Mustafa Lidawi, was abducted over the weekend near Damascus. In the past, Mr. Lidawi had served as the Hamas representative in Iran and Lebanon.

Mr. Lidawi opposed a recent power-sharing agreement between the Islamic militant group Hamas and its Western-backed rival, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and was seen as a supporter of Mr. Assad’s regime. Until recently, Hamas’ top leaders were based in Damascus, but became increasingly critical of Mr. Assad’s crackdown on the uprising and decided to leave the country.

Hamas asked the Syrian authorities to try to find Mr. Lidawi, said a senior official of the group in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the contacts. Mr. Lidawi’s family told Hamas officials he was abducted Saturday.

#Syria: Army resumes Homs shelling ahead of @UN monitors’ arrival

Syrian troops acting on Bashar al-Assad’s orders have reportedly resumed shelling of Homs; just hours before monitors from the United Nations Security Council arrive in the country to oversee an increasingly fragile Libya ceasefire.

The former rebel stonghold of Homs pictured on April 14 (Picture: AFP/Getty)

The United Nations Security Council voted unanimously in favour of dispatching a team of observers, with a six-strong team due to arrive tonight.

UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan’s spokesman Ahmad Fawzi said the monitors would be ‘on the ground in blue helmets tomorrow’, with around 30 more observers to be recruited from the region immediately ahead of a full quota of 250 by the end of the week.

Protesters wave pre-regime national flags during a demonstration in Daraa province (Picture: AFP/Getty)

But the Bashar al-Assad regime’s commitment to the ceasefire has come under fresh suspicion after activists reported heavy shelling of residential neighbourhoods in Homs, with at least three deaths reported.

The Local Coordination Committees activist network said shells were falling at the rate of six every minute in Khaldiyeh, with artillery fire also reported in Bayada, Jouret el-Shayah, Qarabees and Qusour.

Activists released this photo showing the result of army shelling in Qusayr, 15km from Homs (Picture: AFP/Getty)

The claims are impossible to verify as foreign journalists are banned from Syria.

But a Homs-based activists contacted via Skype who gave his name only as Yazan said: ‘What ceasefire? There’s an explosion every five to six minutes. I can also hear the sound of a reconnaissance plane. It’s flying very low.’

Syria, UN Security Council, United Nations

The UN Security Council endorses a plan to send international monitors to Syria (Picture: EPA)

Describing rubble-strewn roads and badly-damaged apartment blocks, he continued: ‘If you saw Homs right now you wouldn’t recognise it. You walk around and it’s not unusual to find dead people in cars on the street.’

The ceasefire negotiated by former UN secretary general Mr Annan began last week, but a precondition of rebels and government forces withdrawing from heavily-populated areas was not respected.

Kofi Annan meets with Ban Ki-moon after the Security Council voted unanimously for the first wave of UN monitors (Picture: Reuters)

His six-point plan calls for political talks between the regime and the opposition to eventually begin, with analysts painting the peace deal as the last diplomatic solution for the crisis in Syria sparked by the regime’s brutal crackdown on peaceful protests that began 13 months ago that has seen at least 9,000 people killed.

The deployment of international observers to Syria was the first time the UN Security Council had come together on Syria after China followed Russia’s leading in backing Moscow’s key ally in the Middle East.

Thousands of anti-regime protesters gather after Friday prayers in Douma, a suburb of Damascus (Picture: AP)

Mr Annan had said he was ‘very relieved and happy’ about the vote.

UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon added: ‘I will make sure that this advanced observer mission will be dispatched as soon as possible and try to make concrete proposals by April 18 for an official observer mission.’

Khalidiyeh, Homs, #Syria: Destruction from today’s shelling 10/4/2012

GRAPHIC WARNING | Homs, #Syria: Person wounded from shelling on Khalidiyeh

Blasts shake Homs as #Syria rebels hit back

By Rita Daou (AFP) – 3 hours ago

BEIRUT — Blasts rocked the flashpoint city of Homs on Sunday as Syria’s regime pressed its assault on protest hubs, while rebels attacked a military base in Damascus province, activists and monitors said.

There was “heavy shelling of Khaldiyeh, Hamidiyeh and Old Homs neighbourhoods by the regime’s army, and explosions shook the whole city,” the Local Coordination Committees said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group, said in a statement that three people were wounded in the Homs district of Safsafa.

In the city of Hama to the north, the Observatory reported that army shelling killed one civilian in the neighbourhood of Murk.

And in the southern town of Nawa, “tanks have entered the main streets, and heavy gunfire by regime forces is reported,” said the LCC, the main opposition activist group inside Syria.

Nawa is in the southern Daraa province, where the popular uprising against President Bashar al-Assad’s iron-fisted rule erupted in March 2011. Monitors say 9,100 people have been killed since then.

The Observatory said an explosion hit a bridge in the Daraa region of Lajat where many army deserters are reported to be.

In the north, near the border with Turkey, rockets were fired into the town of Aazaz as helicopters flew overhead, the LCC said in a statement sent to AFP in Beirut.

It added that rebel fighters of the Free Syrian Army blocked a highway used by the military for reinforcements and supplies to Aazaz, the scene of fierce clashes for the past few weeks.

In Damascus province, rebels fired rocket-propelled grenades in a dawn attack on a military facility in Nabak where ambulances rushed to the scene, said the Observatory.

Mohammed al-Shami, an activist, said fighting erupted at night between soldiers and army deserters and continued into the early hours of Sunday, including in Douma, a hot spot on the capital’s northeastern outskirts.

In eastern Deir Ezzor, the security forces conducted a search and arrest operation, according to the Observatory.

Elsewhere, the official SANA news agency said that an “armed terrorist group” attacked a gas pipeline in the eastern region of Bir al-Jouf.

Nurredin al-Abdo, an activist in northwestern Idlib province, said night-time demonstrations were held across the region, notably in the town of Saraqeb, where monitors reported deadly clashes on Saturday.

At least 28 civilians were killed across Syria on Saturday, including two women and two children in the central province of Homs, according to the Britain-based Observatory.

Sixteen soldiers and two deserters were also killed, it said, taking the day’s toll to 46.

As the year-old conflict showed no signs of abating, rebel fighters set up a military council to unify their ranks and political opposition leaders called a meeting of all dissident groups to forge common objectives.

The latest violence came as UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan was in Moscow to seek the vital backing of Russia, a key ally of the Syrian regime, for his plan to end the bloodshed.

There are growing signs that Moscow is beginning to lose patience with Assad, despite his commitment to massive new Russian arms purchases and the granting of key naval access to the Mediterranean.

The devastating effects of Assad’s shelling in Khalidiyeh, Homs #Syria 24/3/2012

Homs, #Syria: Another Khalidiyeh video of the horrible shelling. Please RT.