Syrian President Bashar al-Assad faced growing Western anger today for preventing aid from entering a devastated district of Homs and over accusations of human rights abuses, including pictures said to show torture victims at a hospital in the city.
Dozens of men, women and children returned on foot to Baba Amr, state television said, passing bullet-pocked and damaged buildings, days after rebel fighters pulled out after a sustained and heavy military assault. The Red Cross was awaiting approval to distribute aid to the devastated district which endured a month of siege.
Residents who fled the district spoke of bodies decomposing under rubble, sewage mixing with litter in the streets, and a campaign of arrests and executions.
"The smell of death was everywhere. We could smell the bodies buried under the rubble all the time," said Ahmad, who escaped to Lebanon. "We saw so much death that at the end the sight of a dismembered body ... stopped moving us."
However Dr Assad said tonight he was determined to go on fighting what he called "foreign-backed terrorism."
"The Syrian people, who have in the past managed to crush foreign plots, ... have again proven their ability to defend the nation and to build a new Syria through their determination to pursue reforms while confronting foreign-backed
terrorism," President Bashar Assad said, according to state news agency SANA.
The military crackdown turned to southern Daraa province, where the uprising began a year ago. Troops shelled a village in Daraa and clashed with military defectors.
Activists said the military blasted a bridge and a tunnel near the border with Lebanon used as escape routes for the wounded and refugees fleeing central Homs province, an opposition stronghold which just endured a heavy, monthlong offensive.
Rupert Colville, spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, described video that has emerged of torture victims allegedly shot secretly in the Military Hospital in Homs as "truly shocking."
The footage broadcast this week on Britain's Channel 4 shows wounded civilian victims blindfolded and chained to their hospital beds, some of them with clear torture marks on their bodies allegedly at the hands of medical staff.
The White House said today President Barack Obama was committed to diplomatic efforts to end the violence, saying Washington sought to isolate Dr Assad, cut off his sources of revenue and encourage unity among his opponents.
But calls for action to protect civilians have grown louder as the Alawite-led security apparatus cracked down on protests and an uprising that has its roots in the majority Sunni community and which has raised the prospect of a civil war.
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, a former ally of Dr Assad's, said the violence in Syria had "started to resemble an inhumane savagery in recent days," calling for a humanitarian corridor to be established in Syria to help civilians.
In Homs, activists said security forces were carrying out raids in a district next to Baba Amr today and reported gunfire and explosions in another area.
In Herak, in Deraa province where the revolt erupted nearly a year ago, residents said armoured vehicles and tanks had massed on the western fringe of the city and in parts of the centre. There were raids reported in the city of Deir al-Zor.
A Chinese diplomat arrived in Damascus today to outline Beijing's peace plan, while UN envoys Kofi Annan and Valerie Amos are expected in the Syrian capital this week.
Reuters