Syria Video Essay: The Military Assault on Homs

Homs is a city of 1.2 million people, larger than Washington DC and Boston combined. For weeks, it has been the target of a large scale military campaign. Syrian soldiers have defected, and have been hiding, and fighting, in the suburbs and rural pieces of Homs, but now, according to many eyewitness reports, and the claims of the videos below, it seems that the Syrian military, loyal to President Bashar al Assad, is targeting the entire city, with minimal discrimination and maximum malice. Communication has largely been cut, but activists are already reporting that at least 114 civilians have been killed and 2100 arrested this month alone in Homs.

These are the scenes of the shelling, and the aftermath, of the assault on Homs on Friday, October 21, 2011:

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The Shelling

A bloody scene in Bab Sbaa (the Lion's Gate district), Homs. Unarmed protesters are fired upon by an almost constant stream of gunfire:

Injured and killed civilians are loaded onto a truck in Bab Sbaa, Homs:

A bloody video, a field hospital is erected as gunfire continues in the Bab Sbaa district. Note that many of these protesters are very young:

Children shot at in Bab al-Dreib, Homs, as they try to cross the street:

Homs burns after the shelling stops:

These were uploaded on October 17th. The violence has been going on for weeks, but it seems like it is only getting worse:

The Aftermath

Most of the videos that we have posted below are clearly marked, by the videographer, as being taken today in the Baba Amr district of Homs. Note that the walls objects in the videos are often filled with holes, supporting the claims that the military is using fragmentation shells and other anti-personnel weapons to do the most damage to soft targets (unarmored targets, like people) as possible, over the largest area possible, using the least discrimination possible.

The army then followed this move by deploying large amounts of tanks. The message to the people of Homs is clear, continue to protest, and continue to harbor defecting soldiers, and you will be destroyed:

The other videos have more detail, but in this first video, the car drives for 1 minutes and 34 seconds, and there is damage apparent in almost every frame of the video:

A business was shelled and burned in Bab Sbaa(Lion's Gate district), Homs:

Rubble falls off of a heavily damaged roof in Bab al-Dreib, Homs, indicating that the damage is even larger than we've documented here: