It's not a war, it's a massacre...

Baba Amr remains completely sealed off, though it fell six days ago, after Free Syrian Army soldiers withdrew from the Homs neighborhood that had been shelled continuously for over four long weeks by Assad’s army.
The regime’s security forces have now moved in, free to wreak havoc as they please with no one to witness their brutality.
As I’m talking to you now, people are dying. There was no restraint with the cameras there. God knows what’s happening now the cameras are gone, Paul Conroy told Sky News last Friday.
The British photographer was wounded in the attack that killed Sunday Times reporter Marie Colvin and French photographer Rémi Ochlik in Homs on February 22.
French reporter Edith Bouvier was also injured, suffering a broken leg.
Conroy, Bouvier, French journalist William Daniels and Spanish reporter Javier Espinosa were all smuggled out of the city last week, before it fell…
According to witnesses in Homs, the security apparatus is now exacting a heavy price from a neighborhood and city that dared to defy Assad.
The government has control over Homs again. They are arresting many people, a Homs resident now exiled in Beirut told the NYT.
Empty buses were seen moving into neighborhoods, then leaving filled with young men and boys, she said, wrote the NYT’s Neil MacFarquhar.
Other activists accuse the regime of deliberately destroying houses and executing  Baba Amr residents suspected of being Free Syrian Army sympathizers.
The smell of death was everywhere. We could smell the bodies buried under the rubble all the time. We saw so much death that at the end the sight of a dismembered body…stopped moving us, Ahmad, a Baba Amr resident who fled to Lebanon, told The Guardian.
Since the Assad regime’s onslaught on Baba Amr began early last month, over 700  residents have been killed.
A convoy of seven trucks dispatched by the International Committee of the Red Cross have been waiting on the outskirts of Baba Amr since Friday, but has still not received the regime’s authorization to enter and deliver much needed aid to its beleaguered population.
The regime explains it is not safe to go there, even though it also claims that order has been restored in the neighborhood.
At the moment we are blocked by the Syrian army and government. The situation is extremely difficult, the weather conditions are tragic. It is very cold, there is fighting and people don’t have access to food or water, and above all there is a big problem of evacuating the wounded, Yves Daccord, the director general of the ICRC, told RTS (Swiss Radio and Television).
A grisly fate awaits Homs’ wounded should they fall in the hands of the Assad regime.
The French photographer Mani, apparently still in Homs, obtained a video secretly filmed in the Homs military hospital by an employee which was shown yesterday on Britain’s Channel 4 News.
In the video, patients are seen chained to their hospital beds, some visibly showing signs of torture.
I have seen detainees being tortured by electrocution, whipping, beating with batons, and by breaking their legs. They twist the feet until the leg breaks. I saw them slamming detainees’ heads against walls. They shackle the patients to beds. They deny them water. Others have their penises tied to stop them from urinating, the hospital employee told Mani.
The pictures are truly shocking, Rupert Colville, UN High Commission for Human Rights spokesman said Tuesday.
 The UN has received similar information corroborating Channel 4 News’ report, according to Colville.
Torture and killings reportedly took place in the Homs military hospital-which is the one shown in Channel 4 footage-by security forces dressed as doctors and allegedly acting with the complicity of medical personnel. In other words, what the (UN) commission of inquiry reported back in November is pretty much what you see both visually and in the witness account in the Channel 4 footage, the spokesman said.
The UN’s inquiry also discovered that the Homs military and Latakia state hospitals had been transformed into torture centers actually within the hospitals.
Latakia is Syria’s main port city, located in the north of the country.
It was attacked by Syrian armed forces ships and tanks last August.
Security agents, in some cases joined by medical staff, chained seriously injured patients to their beds, electrocuted them, beat wounded parts of their body or denied medical attention and water. Medical personnel who did not collaborate faced reprisals, he added.
The brutality of the country’s security forces is notorious. Methods of torture, most of which are known to have been used in Syria over many years, not just in the past year, include severe beatings, electric shocks, suspension for long periods by the limbs, psychological torture and routine humiliation, he concluded.
The international community, although currently paralyzed by Russia and China’s refusal to authorize any meaningful action against their friend Assad, are taking note, however.
The European Union is currently compiling evidence of war crimes committed by the Assad regime, which will one day be utilized against its dignitaries, once the regime falls, as it inevitably will…
I would like to remind Bashar Assad: his father was not made to account for what he did in this world, but his son will sooner or later account for what he did, for the massacre and the oppression. This time, the blood shed in Syrian cities will not go unpunished, Racep Tayyip Erdogan Turkey’s Prime Minister, declared yesterday.
The Assad regime, although severely rattled by the scope and scale of the opposition confronting it, is by no means finished.
Its armed forces are gaining physical momentum on the battlefield…The situation will get worse before it gets better, Marine Gen. James Mattis, Commander of US Central Command, told the US Senate yesterday.
Assad is going to be there for some time because I think he will continue to employ heavier and heavier weapons on his people, he added.
Syria can also count on Russia’s unwavering support.
The fact that the Russian presidential campaign is now over and that Putin was reelected (in an election marred by accusations of  fraud) will have no effect on its policy regarding Syria.
The latter will certainly not become more conciliatory and amenable to Western pressure. Such expectations would be wishful thinking, according to the Russians.
Russia’s stand on the Syrian settlement has never been subject to any short-term considerations, and hasn’t formed under the influence of electoral cycles, unlike that of some of our Western colleagues, a Russia foreign ministry statement said.
As such, the Assad regime can still afford to remain defiant.
The Syrian people, who have in the past managed to crush foreign plots…have again proven their ability to defend the nation and to build a new Syria through their determination to pursue reforms while confronting foreign-backed terrorism, Assad declared yesterday.
The regime however, has not repudiated all attempts by the outside world to find a peaceful solution to the Syrian crisis.
Kofi Annan, a former UN Secretary General, appointed by the UN and the Arab League as their special representative for Syria, plans to go to Damascus on Saturday. The regime welcomes the visit.
Valerie Amos, the UN under secretary general for humanitarian affairs, has finally been granted leave to enter Syria, for a three-day visit.
This afternoon, she succeeded in accompanying a team of Red Crescent volunteers into Baba Amr...
The security apparatus' clean-up operation must thus be over...
Simultaneously however, the regime is escalating its attacks on rebel strongholds.
In Dera’a province, birthplace of the uprising one year ago, the city of Hirak is now surrounded by tanks and under attack.
The clashes are very intense and have been going on since morning, Rami Abdul-Rahman, of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, bases in London, told AP.
Rastan is now also under attack, as is Qusair, near Homs.
In addition, the Syrian armed forces destroyed a bridge over the Orontes river linking Lebanon and Syria, which was used by refugees, wounded activists and journalists to flee the country...
More than 1,500 refugees have made their way to Lebanon in recent days...
Yet, gradually, the regime is slowly losing control of some parts of the country, as the struggle to crush heavy-handedly all pockets of resistance depletes its resources.
Although the government has retaken Homs, it’s losing Aleppo and the broader north, an area that has long been fertile ground for islamist currents, Joshua Landis, an expert on Syria and professor at the University of Oklahoma, wrote on his Syria Comment blog.
The loss of Aleppo, the country’s economic capital, would be a serious blow.
Yet, the struggle is bound to be a long one, particularly since the opposition will have to rely solely on itself to prevail.
The international community is divided, appalled (for the most part) by the regime’s brutality, but terrified at the prospect of Assad’s fall. It sympathizes with the opposition, but has evinced little interest in taking concrete steps to promote its cause.
We may one day regret our reticence to help a people in need.
What does that indifference say about us and the values we profess to uphold?
People brought me in half a baby, saying « where’s the help »?, recalled Paul Conroy.
And I have no answer. I don’t know how we can stand by and watch this. It’s not a war; it’s a massacre, it’s the indiscriminate massacre of men, women and children.
In the years to come we’re going to look back, we’re going to have the shame of sitting back and watching it again, as in Srebrenica, as in Rwanda, and we’re going to say « how did we let this happen under our nose? », Conroy said.
And yet, let it happen we did…
(the YouTube video above is a report compiled by Channel 4 News)