20 neighborhoods in Homs still under the regime shelling since yesterday, activists reported.
Najati Tayyara, prominent dissident figure set
off alarm bells, saying people of the besieged city fear the chemical weapons, according
to Eqtsad newspapers.
''To the second day the regime jet fighters destroying
Homs, killing civilians under green light from the sleeping world,'' activists said.
Analyst to Zaman Alwasl said that regime wants fiercely getting back
Homs ants neighborhoods under his control, before Qusayr and Tal Kalakh, Homs
now the main target of Assad's forces which backed by Hezbollah militia.
Assad's forces launched a major offensive on Saturday against
rebels in Homs, a centre of the two-year-old uprising, in their latest drive to
secure an axis connecting Damascus to the Mediterranean. Reuters reported.
Activists said jets and mortars had pounded rebel-held areas of the
city that have been under siege by Assad's troops for a year, and soldiers
fought battles with rebel fighters in several districts.
"Government forces are trying to storm (Homs) from all
fronts," said an activist using the name Abu Mohammad.
There were no immediate details of casualties but video footage
uploaded by activists showed heavy explosions and white clouds of smoke rising
from what they said were rebel districts. Loud, concentrated rounds of gunfire
could also be heard.
One clip showed thick black smoke rising from a mosque identified
as the 13th-century Khalid ibn al-Walid mosque, on the edge of the Khalidiyah
neighborhood.
Syrian state media said the army was "achieving great
progress" in Khalidiyah but the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an
anti-Assad monitoring group, said there were reports that rebels had destroyed
an army tank as troops tried to penetrate the Old City in the centre of Homs.
The attack on Homs follows steady military gains by Assad's forces,
backed by Lebanese Hezbollah militants, in villages in Homs province and towns
close to the Lebanese border.
Three weeks ago Hezbollah spearheaded Assad's recapture of the
border town of Qusair, a former rebel bridgehead for smuggling in guns and
fighters. Last week the rebels lost another border town, Tel Kalakh.
Those gains have consolidated Assad's control over a corridor of
territory that runs from the capital Damascus through Homs to the traditional
heartland of his minority Alawite sect in the mountains overlooking the
Mediterranean.
They have also alarmed international supporters of the rebels,
leading the United States to announce that it will step up military support.
Saudi Arabia has accelerated deliveries of sophisticated weaponry, Gulf sources
say.
DERAA VICTORY
The interventions by Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia, a staunch backer of
the mainly Sunni rebels, and Shi'ite Hezbollah highlight how the 27-month-old
uprising has divided the Middle East along sectarian lines.
Gulf Arab States, Turkey and Egypt all support the rebels while
Shi'ite Iran and Hezbollah are actively helping Assad whose Alawite community -
an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam - has dominated Syria for more than four decades.
Sunni Islamist fighters from countries across the Middle East have
also flocked to Syria, fighting for the rebels in a war that has killed more
than 100,000 people, driven 1.7 million refugees abroad and displaced another 4
million within Syria's borders.
Hopes of holding a U.S. and Russian-backed peace conference have
faded, with rebels reluctant to negotiate while they are on the defensive
militarily and tensions between Moscow and Washington exacerbating their deep
differences over Syria.
The violence has spilled over frontiers and stirred sectarian
violence in neighboring Iraq and Lebanon. Two people were killed in Lebanon's
northern city of Tripoli on Saturday, one in an explosion and another in sniper
fire between the Alawite district of Jebel Mohsen and adjacent Sunni areas.
Despite losing ground around Damascus and Homs, rebels registered a
symbolic victory on Friday when they overran a major military checkpoint in
Deraa, the southern city where the uprising first erupted.
Rami Abdulrahman, head of the Syrian Observatory, said the fall of
the army post was strategically significant and could change the balance of
power in Deraa, where rebels control most of the old city.
The province of Deraa, on the border with Jordan, has been a
conduit for arms supplies to the rebels.
with Reuters
Zaman Alwasl
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