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Aid convoy poised to enter Syria's battered Baba Amr 2012

03/02 14:14 GMT

After 4 weeks, foolowed with great force the shelling. 20.000 civilians and a doctor have been trapped in the district. During this time, they do a makeshift hospital. A Red Cross
relief convoy was poised to enter the battered Baba Amr neighbourhood of the Syrian city of Homs. The UN rights body appealed to Syria to respect international law after receiving unconfirmed reports of 17 "grisly" executions as regime forces took control of Baba Amr. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said another 10 people were shot dead in Baba Amr on Friday, but its head, Rami Abdel Rahman, added: "The circumstances of their deaths are not clear."

"What is going on is scandalous, there are more than 8,000 dead, hundreds of children, and the city of Homs faces the risk of being wiped off the map," French PFollowing 27 straight days of relentless shelling that has made the neighbourhood an icon of the more than 11-month uprising against Assad's regime. Other parts of Homs, including the Khaldiyeh, Bayyada, Bab Sbaa and Hamidiyeh neighbourhoods, remain in the hands of the "terrorists" and still have to be "dealt with," a security source in Damascus told AFP. Resident Nicolas Sarkozy said at the close of an EU summit.

The SNC announced on Thursday that it was forming a military bureau to coordinate the flow of arms to the rebels after calls from Gulf Arab states for weapons deliveries ran into opposition from Washington, which said it feared Al-Qaeda might exploit the situation.
"Our aim is not to help one of the sides not the Syrian authorities nor the armed opposition but to obtain an all-round reconciliation," he said in comments published on the government website Friday. "We have no special relationship with Syria," he added.