The central Syrian city of Homs, dubbed "the capital ofthe revolution" by the country's rebels, was the scene of heavy fightingas regime troops pressed an offensive against a key rebel district. WithDamascus the political capital and the northern city of Aleppo the maincommercial hub, Homs with its 1.6 million residents is a major industrialcentre.
Homs province is the largest and most strategic in thecountry, lying on key trade routes near the borders with Lebanon and Iraq, andwith its southwestern areas not far from Damascus. A security official said,after the army entered the rebel-held district of Khaldiyeh, that the militaryhoped to eliminate the last pockets of resistance in Homs and the nearby townof Qusayr by the end of the week to free up troops for battle zones in thenorth, such as Aleppo.
The regime of President Bashar al-Assad, which hasrepeatedly accused armed "terrorist" groups of fomenting the unrestthat started in mid-March 2011, launched a large-scale offensive on the city onFebruary 4. Using tanks, helicopters, mortars, rockets and gunfire, troopspounded residential areas of Homs killing some 700 people, mainly civilians.
After weeks of siege the army launched a ground assault andon March 1 took control of the Baba Amr neighbourhood, a bastion of the rebelFree Syrian Army. The attacks also cost the lives of American war reporterMarie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik on February 22, when thebuilding that served as a makeshift media centre in Homs was struck by a Syrianshell.
To the east and west of Homs are oil refineries and gasfields, a car assembly line for Iran's Khodro Company (IKPO) as well as a raftof other private industries. Homs is also an important road junction, whichsees transit goods arriving from the Mediterranean on their way to Iraq. But italso sits on a faultline of sectarian tensions within Syria and is awash withweapons, making anti-regime protests in Homs particularly significant. Mainlydivided along confessional lines, Sunni, Alawite, Christian and mixedneighbourhoods co-exist uneasily.
Sunnis consider themselves to be the true natives of thecity and never took kindly to the mass influx of Alawites -- members of aShiite sect to which Assad also belongs -- to Homs and its surroundingdistricts since the late 1960s. Alawites were received with a mixture ofcontempt and jealousy, because they received far more government and publicpositions than Sunnis.
Activists have accused the authorities of seeking toaggravate sectarian strife almost since the start of the uprising, pointing toa day in July, 2011 when some 30 people from different confessional groups werereportedly killed. Paradoxically, Homs is home to Syria's first militaryacademy, established by the French in 1932, which trained officers at theforefront of the coup that brought the Baath party to power in 1963, includingAssad's late father, Hafez.
