Red Cross handing out aid to victims in Homs as Syrian civil war continues

Red Cross teams began handing out food and blankets in central Homs province on Sunday after days of delays, helping families who fled the besieged neighbourhood of Baba Amr and took shelter in nearby villages.

Government forces have blocked humanitarian access to Baba Amr since Friday, the day after troops seized it from rebels, and it remained blocked on Sunday. Opposition fighters were in control of the neighbourhood for several months,
and a regime offensive on Homs that began in early February aimed to retake rebel-held neighbourhoods inside the city.

Government forces managed to retake Baba Amr after nearly a month of intense and relentless shelling, and activists say hundreds were killed in the daily bombardments that led up to the final battle on Thursday. Some Baba Amr residents
died when, in desperation, they dared to venture out of their homes to forage for food.

Activists have said residents face a humanitarian catastrophe in Baba Amr and other parts of Homs, Syria’s third-largest city with a population of 1 million. Electricity, water and communications have been cut off in frigid temperatures;
food was running low, and many people are too scared to venture out.

The government earlier said it would allow the Red Cross into Baba Amr on Friday but then blocked their access for days, citing security concerns. But in the meantime, activists accused Syrian forces of killing tens of residents
execution-style and burning homes in revenge attacks against those believed to be supporting the rebels.

As the brutal siege of Homs dragged on, Western pressure on President Bashar Assad intensified. The U.S. has called for Mr. Assad to step down, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said he could be considered a war criminal.
The European Union committed itself to document war crimes in Syria to set the stage for a “day of reckoning” for the country’s leadership, in the way that former Yugoslav leaders were tried for war crimes in the 1990s by a special U.N. tribunal.

While the Red Cross continues to appeal for unfettered access to Homs, the organization’s workers were focusing on distributing aid in the village of Abel, about two miles from Homs, and the Inshaat and Tawzii districts of Homs.
“The needs are so far mainly in the forms of food and also blankets because of the cold,” Hicham Hassan, a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said in Geneva.

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Posted by Hamza Jahangir on Mar 5 2012. Filed under Latest News, USA, World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry