U.N. Relief Official Visits Homs Amid New Violence and Lost Confidence
The top United Nations relief official visited Syria’s ravaged city of Homs on Wednesday as part of her assessment of emergency needs in swathes of the country devastated by a year-long uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.
The visit by the official, Valerie Amos, the under secretary general and emergency relief coordinator, represented the first inspection of Homs by an independent outside observer since Syrian armed forces first besieged it more than a month ago in a ferocious campaign to crush an epicenter of armed resistance to Mr. Assad’s rule.
Reuters quoted Hicham Hassan, a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, as saying Ms. Amos toured the Baba Amr neighborhood of Homs, which had suffered enormous destruction, and was accompanied by officials of the Syrian Red Crescent, the country’s Red Cross affiliate organization, which had been waiting for nearly a week to enter that sector of Homs because the Syrian military was allowing no outsiders.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/08/world/middleeast/un-official-scheduled-to-arrive-in-syria.html?hp
