BEIRUT, Lebanon ? At least 20 people were killed in fighting in the rebellious Syrian city of Homs on Monday, as human rights activists urged observers from the Arab League to quickly visit the city, saying it has been under siege by thousands of government troops for days.
The observers, who are arriving over the next two days, are supposed to monitor promised by the government of President Bashar al-Assad to withdraw its tanks and troops from cities and release political prisoners. The mission has coincided 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.
In a statement, the Arab League said that about 50 observers form at least eight Arab countries would conduct of ?field visits? of several Syrian cities on Tuesday, including Homs, Idlib, Hama and Dara?a. The group would include ?civilian and military? experts.
Residents of Homs spoke of an intensifying war in some neighborhoods, pitting defecting soldiers and other armed revolutionaries against the security forces and the army. 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: they were surviving 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. I have a headache from these bombs,? he said.
In the city?s Inshaat neighborhood, residents said that the dead included a 60-year old man named Menhal Atassi, who was apparently shot as he walked to a local mosque. Human rights groups released the names of at 20 other people that had been killed, but their accounts of the death toll were impossible to verify.
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.
Videos posted by activists on the Internet showed bodies in the rubble of buildings and mortar shells striking apartment buildings in Syria?s third-largest city, which has been among the most violent during the uprising. Sectarian murders have left scores of people dead, and armed defectors have carved out strongholds in parts of the city.
Some of the killings seemed to underscore the increasingly confused state of the battle in Homs. A 56-year-old woman in the Malaab al-Baladi neighborhood said that on Monday morning, armed men told a taxi driver to stop his car then shot at it when he refused.
The car fell into the garden of the woman?s house. ?We don?t know who stopped him,? she said, adding that the man could have been an informer stopped by revolutionaries, or someone that security forces were looking for. ?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 this anymore,? she said.
Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=dce1af56ff80d76e536962e5b9874a51
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