Syrian Army Pounds Rebel Towns
The Syrian army kept up its bombardment of rebel strongholds on Sunday despite an international outcry over the killing of 92 people, a third of them children, in the shelling of a central town.
Arab and Western governments expressed outrage at the "massacre" in the town of Houla on Friday and Saturday.
But the rebel Free Syrian Army warned that unless the international community took concrete action it would no longer be bound by a U.N.-backed peace plan that was supposed to start with a ceasefire last month.
Government troops raked rebel neighborhoods of the central city of Hama with heavy machinegun fire, while the town of Rastan to its south came under artillery fire for a 14th straight day, a human rights watchdog said.
Rebel fighters who pulled out of the flashpoint central city of Homs earlier this year in the face of a devastating assault by the army are holed up in Rastan, activists say.
"The town is being hit at a rate of two shells a minute," the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Troops loyal to President Bashar Assad also clashed with rebel fighters in the town of Harasta near Damascus.
Source: Agence France Presse
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