BEIRUT — Aid workers were blocked by Syrian authorities from entering the shattered Baba Amr neighborhood in the central city of Homs on Friday with desperately needed supplies, Red Cross officials said.
The International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva said it had dispatched food and blankets to Homs from Damascus, but the convoy was not permitted to enter the Baba Amr district, a former opposition stronghold that was shelled by the Syrian army for nearly a month before the rebels fled.
“It is unacceptable that people who have been in need of emergency assistance for weeks have still not received any help,” ICRC president Jakob Kellenberger said in a statement from Geneva. “We are staying in Homs tonight in the hope of entering Baba Amr in the very near future.”
The statement said Syrian authorities promised Thursday to allow a joint team of ICRC and Syrian Arab Red Crescent Society workers to enter Baba Amr on Friday but apparently reneged. Kellenberger renewed an appeal he made several days ago for a daily two-hour truce to deliver emergency assistance.
“The humanitarian situation was very serious then, and it is worse now,” he said.
Fighters from the Free Syrian Army announced Thursday that they were staging a tactical retreat from the neighborhood, exposing the limitations of the country’s fledgling armed rebellion.
With all communications severed, including satellite connections, it was difficult to ascertain what was happening in Baba Amr. But all available evidence pointed to a rout of the anti-government fighters, who had seized control of the neighborhood months ago, turning it into a nationwide symbol of the burgeoning armed rebellion against the rule of President Bashar Assad.
On Thursday, activists in Homs said troops were moving through Baba Amr detaining all males over the age of 15, even as world powers at the United Nations issued a non-binding Security Council resolution calling for immediate humanitarian access to the stricken area.
At a European Union summit in Brussels, French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced that France had closed its embassy in Damascus to express outrage at Assad’s crackdown.
“He must step down,” Sarkozy said of the Syrian president, adding that Assad and his military leaders should be tried by an international tribunal. “They must pay for what they have done.”
Separately, the EU called on Assad’s army to halt its attacks on rebels and end “human rights abuses inflicted on the civilian population.” It urged further pressure on Damascus and told Brussels-based EU bureaucrats to prepare more European sanctions against Assad and his lieutenants.
Col. Malik al-Kurdi, a Free Syrian Army spokesman reached by telephone in Turkey, appealed for weapons, saying that only the force of arms could bring down Assad and protect the civilians.
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French journalists return home • PARIS — The long and treacherous journey home ended Friday for two French journalists trapped for nine days in a besieged Syrian city — an experience one called a “nonstop nightmare.”
After landing outside Paris where the French president and loved ones awaited them, one was carried from the plane on a stretcher, while the other smiled and punched his fist in the air.
Edith Bouvier of the daily Le Figaro and William Daniels, an award-winning photographer, had sneaked into Syria to try to get an eyewitness view of the government crackdown in the country, where thousands have been killed since an uprising began a year ago.
They soon found themselves trapped inside the besieged Baba Amr district of Homs. On Feb. 22, shelling killed French photographer Remi Ochlik and American reporter Marie Colvin. It also wounded Bouvier and British photographer Paul Conroy.
U.N. report finds NATO’s air-raid investigation lacking •BEIRUT — NATO has not sufficiently investigated the air raids it conducted on Libya that killed at least 60 civilians and wounded 55 more during the conflict there, according to a U.N. report released Friday.
Nor has Libya’s interim government done enough to halt the violence perpetrated by revolutionary militias seeking to exact revenge on loyalists, real or perceived, to the government of Moammar Khadafy, the report concluded.
The report was published without publicity on the website of the U.N. Human Rights Council, based in Geneva.
Denver Post wire services
