Syria’s ‘Srebrenica’: Situation Grows Increasingly Grim in Rebel Stronghold of Homs - News - International
Two foreign journalists died in a Syrian government shelling on Wednesday while reporting from the rebel stronghold of Homs. Hounded by snipers and hunger, activists are comparing the bombardment to genocide and begging the West for help.
“We can’t recover them. Both of their bodies are lying in the doorway. But, if we go to get them, we’ll be shot by the snipers!” For a few minutes on Wednesday, it was possible to reach Omar Shakir in Homs, the stronghold of the Syrian resistance. Shakir is one of the rebels’ spokesmen in the city’s Baba Amr district, where the American journalist Marie Colvin and French photographer Rémi Cochlin had been killed by Syrian government shelling at around 7:30 that morning.
They had been in the back of the apartment serving as the “media center” when the first missile shook the room. “We wanted to move to another building, but the shelling was constant,” Shakir says. “Then there were two minutes of quiet, and they ran — and were hit by the next round of fire, which struck the building’s entrance. Both of them died immediately.”
This was the same building that SPIEGEL reporters worked in for a week last December, when Baba Amr become the first liberated zone in central Syria. Soldiers who had defected from the Syrian army to join the Free Syrian Army (FSA) defended the run-down neighborhood in the southwest part of the city from troops loyal to the regime. At the time, SPIEGEL described it as an area of three square kilometers (one square mile) under a state of emergency. Still, things were quieter there than in other parts of the city, where reporters described how government snipers were hunting people down, how the wounded were being killed rather than treated in state hospitals and how Assad’s troops were starting to starve entire sections of the city.
An Increasingly Desperate Situation
In the meantime, things have gotten much worse in Homs.
Since February 4, several districts in the west and north of the rebel stronghold have been under constant bombardment from tanks and rockets. Shells batter homes every few minutes or sometimes even seconds. They either kill the last remaining residents immediately or leave them to die slowly since there is no longer anyone who can come to their rescue. Snipers on nearby high-rises take aim at everyone they get in their sights.
The epicenter of this horror is Baba Amr. Streets there are reduced to heaps of rubble. The surviving doctors work without pause beneath the small mosque they evacuated to after their previous clinic was bombarded. They amputate legs and arms without anesthesia; they have hardly any medication or bandages left, let alone blood for transfusions. And they no longer know what to do with all the dead bodies.