City of Homs is focus of Syria’s uprising

MAFRAQ, Jordan – Every day, rockets and mortars fired by regime forces rattle the streets of Homs. Armed rebels ambush government military checkpoints. Hatred brews on either side of the avenues that divide the bloodstained Syrian city.

Homs has become the focus of the worst violence of the 11-month-old uprising, which appears to be morphing into a civil war with fearsome sectarian overtones. Syria’s third-largest city has become the major center of resistance and reprisal, fueled in part by increasingly bold army defectors who want to bring down President Bashar Assad’s autocratic regime by force.

Early in the uprising, residents tried to re-create the fervor of Egypt’s Tahrir Square, only to face siege upon siege by government forces for nearly a year. Homs now is a powerful symbol of the revolution.

With many neighborhoods outside government control, the regime’s tanks and snipers are opening fire in an offensive that began early Saturday to root out resistance and retake control of an area that holds great strategic importance in Syria.

“You’ll be shot dead if you go out,” Samar Rahim, 32, told The Associated Press in this Jordanian farming town along the Syrian border, one week after she fled Homs with her family. “Snipers are firing at anyone in the streets. That’s why we left everything behind.”

Rahim and other refugees interviewed by the AP described living in fear, hunkering down inside their Homs and desperately trying to protect their young children.

A woman who was three months pregnant was shot and killed when she ventured out for an errand, Rahim said. A 10-year-old boy on her street also was killed. Another neighbor was shot immediately when she opened her front door.

“We didn’t dare go out, not even for bread, fearing we would be shot,” Rahim said.

She used her family’s savings to flee 150 miles to Jordan, along with her husband, five children and her mother-in-law, who is paralyzed.

Homs, a city of about 1 million, has shown great sympathy for the opposition since the early days of the uprising. In April, protesters carried mattresses, food and water to the main Clock Square, hoping to emulate Cairo’s Tahrir Square, where activists demanded the downfall of the Mubarak regime.