Syrian President Bashar al-Assad faced growing Western anger on Tuesday 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."
US Senator John McCain, an early advocate of the Nato no-fly zone in Libya which helped to topple Muammar Gaddafi, said the United States should lead an international effort to protect Syrian population centres through air strikes on Assad forces. Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, a former ally of 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 on Tuesday, 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 on Tuesday to outline Beijing's peace plan, while UN envoys Kofi Annan and Valerie Amos are expected in the Syrian capital this week.
The United Nations says more than 7,500 civilians have died in Syria's bloody crackdown on protests against Assad's government, which says the nearly year-long uprising is a campaign by foreign-backed Islamist insurgents. Authorities said in December 2,000 police and soldiers had been killed since protests, inspired by Arab uprisings which have overthrown four veteran leaders, erupted last March.
Secretly shot video footage aired on Monday by a British television station showed what it said were Syrian patients tortured by medical staff at a state-run hospital in Homs. A Chinese envoy, former ambassador to Damascus Li Huaxin, arrived in Syria on Tuesday, Xinhua news agency reported, and was due to meet Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem on Wednesday. The UN-Arab League special envoy to Syria, Kofi Annan, will also travel to Damascus on Saturday for what would be his first visit since he was named to the post last month.
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