The Assad government escalated its military onslaught on the Syrian opposition with the most intense bombardment of rebel-held areas so far, as the west and the Arab world scrambled to find a new diplomatic strategy without Russian and Chinese help.
Tanks and heavy artillery were used on an unprecedented scale, according to witnesses. More than 200 rockets fell in the space of three hours on just one part of Homs, the opposition-controlled suburb of Baba Amr, residents said.
One activist, Raji, speaking from a basement inside Baba Amr, said Syrian forces were now using a heavier artillery round with devastating effect. In addition to the 27 people killed , he said many people were lying dead under the rubble of their houses. There were also reports that 18 premature babies had died in hospital after power cuts caused their incubators to fail, according to the BBC. State TV denied the reports.
The Guardian has been unable to independently verify eyewitness accounts or casualty figures, but similar reports came from rebel areas around the country as Bashar al-Assad – spared from a UN resolution calling for his departure by Russian and Chinese intervention on his behalf – appeared to speed up attempts to eliminate the threat to his regime.
In the face of the increase in violence, western and Arab governments urgently sought a new response. The Pentagon was reported to be reviewing contingency plans for intervention in Syria, from providing humanitarian relief to direct military action. There was no sign that the Obama administration was seriously contemplating military options, but the president is under increasing pressure in an election year to respond decisively to the reports of mass killing in Syria.
"We are seriously dying here. It is really war," Waleed Farah told the Guardian via satellite phone from al-Khaldiyeh, another rebel-held neighbourhood in Homs.
Hopes of quickly healing the global rift caused by the weekend's security council vote came to nothing. When William Hague spoke to the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, to ask Moscow to reconsider its vote and its arms sales to Damascus, Lavrov said there was no independent confirmation of the regime's use of heavy weaponry in Homs and elsewhere and insisted that the supply of Russian arms was legal, according to British officials. After visiting Damascus on Tuesday, Lavrov called for a political dialogue and a UN resolution backing the deployment of more observers in Syria, but the opposition Syrian National Council has rejected Moscow as a broker and is insisting that Assad step down in line with an Arab League peace plan.
Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, said: "We of course condemn all violence regardless of its source, but one cannot act like an elephant in a china shop. Help them, advise them – limit, for instance, their ability to use weapons – but do not interfere under any circumstances."
China also defended its decision to veto the UN resolution and rejected Hague criticism's of the vote as "extremely irresponsible" and "totally unacceptable".
With no sign of a break in the diplomatic deadlock, urgent efforts were under way aimed at building as broad an international coalition as possible to keep up the diplomatic pressure on Damascus. A "friends of Syria" conference is expected to be called in the next few days to agree joint measures, including new sanctions, anti-Assad resolutions at the UN general assembly, and diplomatic support for the opposition Syrian National Council with the aim of molding it into a credible alternative to the Assad regime. The next steps will be decided at meetings of the Gulf Co-operation Council on Saturday and the Arab League on Sunday. Most observers, however, believe Assad can weather such pressure as long as he can rely on backing from Moscow and Beijing.
Turkey declared it was launching its own initiative to confront what it warned was becoming a grave political and humanitarian crisis. The prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, spoken by telephone to the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, and the foreign minister, Ahmet Davotuglu, flew to Washington to press for an emergency international conference. Western capitals support the Turkish initiative but argue the leading role and venue is better left to Arab states.
Turkey's ambassador to London, Ahmet Ünal Çeviköz, said Turkey would not insist on being hosts. He said: "The important thing is to form as wide as possible an international platform of like-minded countries to show the determination of the international community that there is no possibility of a return to the status quo ante. Assad thinks he can buy time but we have to show we have no more confidence in him."
Çeviköz said his government believed the death toll was "much more severe" than the 5,000-7,000 reported, and argued that priority should be given to ending the violence and addressing the humanitarian needs of the Syrian people.
"The people of Homs are facing not just bombardment but a blockade of the city, with a serious lack of food and medicine," the ambassador said. "There needs to be contingency planning on ways of reaching out to people and regions in Syria which are facing this crisis."
Turkey has floated the idea of a humanitarian corridor or a safe zone for displaced populations, but Çeviköz said those decisions would have to be taken at the proposed international conference.
If Russia and China continued to oppose such concerted action, he added: "They will have the responsibility of being the culprits in a humanitarian crisis."
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