Syrian People Fleeing to Lebanon

"LandepNews"

Syrian People Fleeing to Lebanon

About 2,000 Syrian people crossed into Lebanon on Monday coming from the city of Homs, after the Syrian government engaged in an attack of the city with the intention of putting it to rest for good. People were said by the United Nations refugee agency to have passed into Lebanon in a run for their lives, some of them bringing only plastic bags with things they were able to collect before they had to leave in a hurry.
There were reported people from all over the Homs province, which borders Lebanon, as the regime initiated a hunt down of the protesters. The city of Homs, the capital of the province, has been pounded by shells and heavy weaponry for a month, leaving hundreds of civilians dead as the regime attacked the Baba Amr neighborhood, believed to host the protesters.
According to the international estimations, the death toll in Syria is of 7,500, with a dramatic surge since the assault on Homs started. Activists consider that more than 8,000 people have been killed.
The United Nations Human Rights Committee last week voted a resolution that was condemning the killings of the civilians by the regime in Damascus, and there are voices that call for the referring of the case to the International Criminal Court in the Hagues, which could issue an international arrest warrant in the name of Bashar al-Assad.
Accusations of war crimes were also raised by U.S. State Secretary Hillary Clinton, while the European Union said it was documenting the crimes the regime in Syria has committed, so that it may be brought to justice as the war criminals of the Yugoslavian wars were.
The Red Cross has distributed help in the city of Homs by air, but its access was blocked on Friday, as the relief workers arrived in Baba Amr to remove debris left behind by the shelling. Reports say that dozens of residents of Baba Amr neighborhood have been executed and homes were burnt in retaliation for what was considered a support for the cause of the protesters.
The area was cut off, for security reasons, the Syrian authorities say, and the people in there were left in cold and hunger. Activists accused the government of attempting to conceal its actions toward the people in this neighborhood.
Some 400 families received milk powder, medicine, food and blankets from the Red Cross in the Abel village, and the Red Crescent announced that it would be able to enter Homs neighborhood on Monday.
While the Western world is intensifying its efforts to isolate Assad’s regime on international level, it can still count on the support of Russia and China, who refused to accept any interference in the restive country.
On Monday, China decided to send its former ambassador to Damascus to demand the president to implement a ceasefire and to emphasize its opposition to such interventions like the one in Homs. The Chinese envoy is to hold talks with Assad on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Syria praised on Monday the return to presidency of Russia of Vladimir Putin, saying that he was a strong man with a capacity of reshaping the international relations.
The United Nations special envoy to Syria, former secretary general Kofi Annan, promised he would militate by the Syrian president for the ceasefire and the resumption of talks with opposition.
Lebanon-based Daily Paper newspaper reported that thirteen French officers were captured in Syria by the military, thus fueling rumors about Western implication in the conflict.
The French foreign ministry dismissed the report of the newspaper and restated that no French soldier was on the Syrian soil. The French defense ministry, The Telegraph reports, was less categorical about it, neither confirming or infirming it.
The Daily Star, which is a respectable newspaper in Beirut, is quoting a pro-Syrian Palestinian source in Damascus, which says that the French soldiers are being held in a field hospital in Homs.
There is no information on how they got there, or whether they are part of a larger contingent, but the leaders in Paris and Damascus are said to negotiate what to do with them.
The Syrian government made no comment on the presence of French troops on its soil, and the NATO secretary general said no intervention will be made as it was made in Libya, where the French defense ministry had to admit that weapons were delivered along with the humanitarian help, and where Western military boots have been reported in various media reports before the successful taking of Tripoli.
There was no comment made on whether the French were there to evacuate the French journalists trapped by the shelling of Homs. The French photographer who escaped the city said he had not received any help from the French troops.
Russian intelligence officials had said a month ago that Western troops are already operating in Syria, training the protesters and arming them. Other sources said that about 15,000 al-Quds from Iran were on the field to protect the regime. None of these sources was confirmed.
Damascus motivates its attacks on the population and its every action over the last year as a fight against a conspiracy intended to take the regime down. The entire defense of Bashar al-Assad rests on it, especially after he made it clear that he had never ordered any troops to shoot at people, and that only a mad leader would do such a thing. The dead in these months are, in the current leadership’s eyes, casualties of some war against a foreign aggressor.

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