HOMS, Syria - Assad forces try to bomb Homs into submission

[tabatha]

(Reuters) - Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces rained rockets and bombs down on opposition-held neighborhoods of the city of Homs on Wednesday, reducing buildings to rubble and killing more than 80 people, including two Western journalists.

The barrages marked an intensification of a nearly three-week offensive to crush resistance in Homs, one of the focal points of a nationwide uprising against Assad's 11-year rule, and prompted further international condemnation.

More than 60 bodies, both rebel fighters and civilians, were recovered from one area of Homs' Babo Amro neighborhood after an afternoon bombardment, adding to 21 killed earlier in the day, activists said.

"Helicopters flew reconnaissance overhead then the bombardment started," Homs activist Abu Abei told Reuters.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/22/us-syria-idUSL5E8DB0BH20120222

[pelsar]

1. does mr assad have a choice?

his dad did it, though much quicker, with gas, artillery, arial bombardment etc and got himself "peace."

his son, if he doesn't put down the revolt will end up like Hussain, Kaddafi or Mubarak....i suspect none are acceptable to him, so he will keep killing until they quit.

[tabatha]

2. Syria, in particular, had peaceful demonstrations for months. They were met with bullets.

I guess peaceful demonstrations in the US should be bombed into submission?

If you think Kaddafi or Mubarak should still be in power, maybe you should go live in Syria or Iran or Bahrain. Democracy, votes and elections are not worth it.

[pelsar]

5. i just commented on the reality....not the fantasy of "democracy suddenly blossoming

you tell me whats preferable a Kaddafi that provide universal health care, subsidized housing, education and kept the various tribes at each others throats along with a "few torture chambers" etc.

vs a no central state dictatorship with no healthcare etc and various fiefdoms being created each busy defining their new borders while using radical islam to judge people by and use it as its base?

granted this has not happened, and i sure can't read the future but it sure is one viable option....
______

or how about egypt? seems they just traded in a secular dictator for a theocratic council (they have the majority) or perhaps a military council-depends upon internal politics.....which is your versions of "democracy"

the point is Assad can see his future if he loses......so he's not going to "surrender"

[tabatha]

3. The horror in Homs (video at link)

"Mani", a photographer who has been to Homs several times, lived through and filmed the beginning of the assault, the effects on the population, and the response of the Free Syrian Army to the massacre, on the first day, of over 140 people.

While the world has become used to grainy shaky and gruesome footage and images from Homs fed through whatever internet connection is available, Mani’s crystal clear and incredible footage gives perhaps the clearest and most frightening account of what Homs has been like for the past three weeks.

http://www.channel4.com/news/the-horror-in-homs

[tabatha]

4. Marie Colvin: Syrian violence is the hideous death cry of a species sinking towards extinction

There is a video online showing the bodies of Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik. They are covered in the dust and rubble of a destroyed house, its grey concrete set against a grey sky.

It is shocking, though almost commonplace now, to see friends and relations like this, their agony beamed around the world before you have even been informed, still less taken in the news of their deaths. Instancy is more important than contemplation.

But what is more shocking is that for every Westerner caught in the firestorm, there are thousands of similar images, reflecting similar realities, of those who have no names and only simulacra of stories, and those often forgotten behind the potency of the visible. The man being whipped into unconsciousness in an Idlib police station, or beaten by a braying mob of soldiers bearing down in escalating waves in a Hama street – did anyone ever discover who they were, what they had done, or whether they survived?

Marie Colvin, in her last posting on the Facebook group with which she shared the traumas that she was witnessing, described the death of a baby, whose name will probably never now surface in any newspaper. “Shrapnel, doctors could do nothing,” she wrote. “His little tummy just heaved and heaved until he stopped.”

This is how it has been for three weeks now in the suburb of Baba Amr, a daily repeater gun of death. Siege is as old as war itself, of course; there is nothing new in that. Tyrants have bombarded even their own cities, notably President Bashar al-Assad’s father Hafez in Hama 30 years ago.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/9099318/Marie-Colvin-Syrian-violence-is-the-hideous-death-cry-of-a-species-sinking-towards-extinction.html