Assad loyalists blast their way deeper into Homs

Forces loyal to the regime of Syrian president Bashar Assad thrust into the city of Homs on Wednesday, using tanks, artillery and helicopter gunships to kill over 100 residents, according to opposition groups. According to eyewitnesses, Alawite Shabiha militias have also been unleashed on the cities Sunni Muslim population, stoking fears of an Iraq-style sectarian bloodbath. Doctors and Red Cross workers in the city attempting to treat the wounded have also reported being targeted by pro-regime forces. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared that Assad had lost “legitimacy” as his government continued laying the groundwork for a wide ranging coalition to intervene in the Syrian revolt. But in a stern warning against a Libyan-style military intervention, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who led Russia’s brutal war on Chechnya in the early part of the last decade, decried the pattern of Western “interference” in Libya and elsewhere as a “cult of violence.”

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Elsewhere, diplomats from the EU are busy formulating new diplomatic and economic sanctions on the Assad regime, expected to be finalized by the end of the month.

“Obviously, details are crucial. But [EU] member states agree on the principle,” one diplomat said. “It is still a matter of discussion to what extent we can take such a measure without damaging overall trade, because it is not the intention to halt trade completely.”

Elsewhere, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé dismissed pledges by the regime of peaceful intentions as deceit, saying, “we’re not going to fall for it.”