“We are unarmed people who are dying,” shouted one man, shown in a video uploaded to YouTube on Tuesday, as he accosted some of the 50 observers now in the country. He asked them to go deeper into the city and pointed out out pools of blood and shattered buildings. “Where is the world?” asked a man in another video.
Opposition groups had called for the Arab League to send a team to Homs, regarded as a center of the uprising, to monitor whether Syrian authorities were sticking to an agreement to withdraw soldiers from populated areas and stop using deadly force against protesters.
Just before the visit, army tanks withdrew from the city or were hidden in government buildings, and snipers on the rooftops exchanged their uniforms for civilian clothes, said Saleem Qabani, a protester reached by Skype. He added that he saw soldiers near a security checkpoint changing into police uniforms.
Syria has imposed strict limits on reporters in the country, making it impossible to independently confirm his and other reports.
As the monitors visited the hard-hit Homs neighborhood of Baba Amr, tens of thousands of people gathered in the streets and headed toward Clock Square in the city center to demand the ouster of Assad, said Rami Abdulrahman of the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
At the demonstration, the largest in the city since the summer, observers were able to see security forces firing on the crowd, Qabani said. “The massacre committed was in front of their eyes, so their visit did not change anything,” he said.
Anti-government activists say that more than 100 people have been killed by security forces in Homs in the past week and that areas including Baba Amr have been surrounded by hundreds of tanks, which have been shelling residential areas, while food, fuel and medicine run low. Some elements of the opposition in Homs have taken up arms, allying themselves with the loose group of army defectors and rebels known as the Free Syrian Army.
“The regime used the last several days as an opportunity to escalate their attacks on several . . . neighborhoods in Homs and other cities prior to the deployment of these monitors,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Tuesday in Washington.
Toner also expressed hope that the monitors would be able to do their work. “We obviously look to these individuals to be intrepid in their search for the truth of what’s happening on the ground,” he said. He said the United States “would . . . demand that the Syrian authorities allow them full access to the Syrian people in order to carry out their mission.”
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