HOMS, Syria — Amid reports that nearly 70 people had been killed with guns and knives in the countryside around Homs Monday, an attempt to evacuate foreign journalists from the besieged city failed at the last minute.
However, the Red Crescent did manage to bring out three wounded Syrians.
A negotiator in the evacuation efforts said the effort to bring out two injured Western reporters and the bodies of two others fell through “at the last minute after ambulances had entered (the neighborhood of) Baba Amr,” AFP reported.
The source declined to specify if regime forces or rebels had blocked the operation.
A Western diplomatic source in Damascus told AFP that three wounded Syrians did, however, manage to leave in Syrian Red Crescent ambulances.
The head of the Arab-Syrian Red Crescent, Abdel Rahman Attar, said, “Our team, composed of some 20 volunteers, extremely courageous with four ambulances and a hearse, entered Baba Amr and remained there for nearly three hours while representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) waited outside.”
He said his team was told by an intermediary in Baba Amr that French reporter Edith Bouvier refused to leave if the conditions she insisted on were not met, AFP reported.
“We do not know her conditions and we do not know if she really refused because we were not able to have direct contact with her,” he added.
Earlier Monday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy alluded to a possible evacuation of Bouvier and British photographer Paul Controy, along with the bodies of American veteran war correspondent Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik.
“We have the beginnings of a solution,” Sarkozy told RTL radio. “It seems that things are starting to move.”
At the same time, there seemed no let-up in the violence that has strangled Homs for three weeks.
The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 68 people were killed with knives and guns in the western countryside of Homs, AFP reported.
At the same time, AFP said the Syrian army had been shelling the town of Qusayr, southwest of Homs, with rockets, shell blasts and light arms fire. It was not immediately clear if this was the fighting referred to in the Observatory report.
Meanwhile, in Washington, State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland called Syria’s referendum on a new constitution “absolutely cynical.”
The new constitution received nearly 90 percent approval in Sunday’s referendum, the government announced Monday.
It loosens the ruling Baath Party’s grip on political power and paves the way for multiparty elections, while also capping the presidential term in Syria for the first time in decades.
Nuland, however, told reporters, “We dismiss it (the referendum) as absolutely cynical.
“Essentially what he (President Bashar al Assad)’s done here is put a piece of paper that he controls to a vote so that he can try to maintain control,” Nuland said.
“Even the referendum that they put forward is ridiculous in the sense that it requires that the state approve any of these patriotic opposition groups. So he’s going to hand pick who gets to be in the opposition and who doesn’t,” she added.