DAMASCUS—Syrian forces overran the Baba Amr district of powderkeg Homs on Thursday after rebels retreated, potentially marking a turning point in President Bashar al-Assad’s bid to crush an increasingly armed uprising.
As rebel fighters pulled back, the opposition Syrian National Council (SNC) warned of a “massacre” in the rebel neighborhood by Syrian forces, while aid agencies said they would urgently try to get there to deliver aid and evacuate the wounded.
The SNC, slamming “confusion” among the rebel ranks, said in Paris it would provide leadership to an outgunned and fragmented force and control the flow of arms to fighters on the ground.
The rebels said they had pulled out “tactically” from Baba Amr after nearly two days of an all-out assault by the feared Fourth Armoured Division, led by a younger brother of President Bashar al-Assad, Maher, following 27 straight days of relentless shelling of their bastion.
Rebels “have pulled out tactically in order to protect the remaining civilians,” said Colonel Riyadh al-Asaad, the leader of the Free Syrian Army, which is made up mostly of deserters.
The FSA was formed mid-2011 in response to a brutal crackdown by Assad’s forces on anti-regime protesters, and now boasts at least 20,000 armed fighters, although the numbers are impossible to verify.
A Syrian security official said in Damascus that the army was in total command of the Homs neighborhood, which had become the symbol of resistance to the regime.
“The Syrian army controls all of Baba Amr. The last pockets of resistance have fallen,” the official told AFP.
State television aired footage it said was filmed inside Baba Amr, including interviews with people it said were residents angry with the rebels.
The SNC urged the international community to act to prevent to protect residents, charging that the Fourth Armoured Brigade wasd conducting “barbaric operations against civilians.”
“We urge the international community, Muslim and Arab states to intervene immediately to prevent a potential massacre in the coming hours against tens of thousands of children, women and elderly people,” it said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 21 people were killed in Homs on Thursday, including 17 civilians caught up in the battle for control of Baba Amr.
Global campaigning organization, Avaaz, said the 17 were “beheaded or partially beheaded” in the farming area on the outskirts of Baba Amr.
In total, 39 people, including eight loyal soldiers and seven deserters, were killed in violence across Syria on Thursday, the Observatory said.
The International Committee of the Red Cross and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent were preparing to urgently reach the conflict zone, an ICRC spokesman said.
“The ICRC and the SARC will go on Friday to Baba Amr to deliver humanitarian aid and evacuate the wounded,” Damascus spokesman Saleh Dabbakeh told AFP.
French journalist Edith Bouvier, who suffers from multiple fractures, is believed still trapped inside Baba Amr.
On the political front, the SNC said its military bureau, announced on Wednesday, would coordinate the flow of weapons to the rebels following mounting calls from Gulf Arab states for arms to be delivered despite US fears that Al-Qaeda may exploit any further militarization of the crisis.
“The SNC will be this link between those who want to help and the revolutionaries,” its leader Burhan Ghalioun told reporters in Paris.
“It is out of the question that arms go into Syria in confusion,” he added.
The all-out assault on Homs’s defiant neighborhood came as international envoy Kofi Annan said he hopes to go to Damascus with a clear message that the “violence must stop,” and the UN Human Rights Council called on Syria to allow relief supplies in to besieged protest cities.
Britain announced that it was following the United States in closing its embassy and pulling out its remaining diplomats in response to the “deterioration of the security situation in Damascus.”
UN political chief B Lynn Pascoe told the Security Council on Tuesday that “well over 7,500” people have been killed since Assad’s forces began a crackdown on anti-regime protests that erupted in March last year.
A resolution adopted by the UN Human Rights Council on Thursday condemned the “continued widespread and systematic violations of human rights” and called on Damascus allow aid organizations and UN agencies to deliver desperately needed supplies.
Russia, Cuba and China voted against the resolution while India, the Philippines and Ecuador abstained.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, lambasted Russia for its failure to produce an aid plan for Syria, despite Moscow’s great influence with Assad.
“We are doing everything we can think of to influence the Russians and the Chinese, particularly the Russians: they’re the ones with the very deep, long-standing relationship with the Assad family,” Clinton told the House Foreign Affairs Committee in Washington.
The Syrian foreign ministry said it was willing to discuss a date for a visit by UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos, after her announcement on Wednesday that she had been turned away prompted an outcry.