(Zaman Al Wasl)- Syrian regime security has prevented relatives of rebels and opponents from returning home to the Old City of Homs after three years of displacement, local activists told Zaman al-Wasl.
Last May 2014, rebels evacuated the Old City of Homs over a deal sponsored by the United Nations. But since that time many refugee families have not had the permission to return home and even who was able to return has no fund to resurrect his house from ruble.
Activist Abu Adib al-Homsi said that Assad’s opponents have big concerns that their families would have persecuted by Syrian security if they had return.
Al-Homsi said most of people, who were allowed to return back to the Old City, have no political background and from whom work in the Syrian government.
The Syrian city of Homs, dubbed "the capital of the revolution" by rebels, has been a key flashpoint since the early days of the almost four-year-old revolt against Bashar al-Assad.
Homs has long been a key flashpoint. Early in the uprising which broke out in March 2011, thousands of people protested regularly in the city centre. Then starting early 2012, the army launched a string of massive offensives aimed at recapturing rebel areas of Syria's third city.
Homs also sits on a faultline of sectarian tensions within Syria. Mainly divided along confessional lines, Sunni, Alawite, Christian and mixed neighbourhoods have co-existed uneasily.
Sunnis consider themselves to be the true natives of the city and never took kindly to the mass influx of Alawites -- members of a Shiite sect to which Assad also belongs -- to Homs and its surrounding districts since the late 1960s. (With AFP)
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