Homs: Syria's 'Revolution Capital'

The Syrian city of Homs, dubbed "the capital of the revolution," has been under siege by regime forces and suffered the heaviest losses in the country's 11-month uprising.

With Damascus the political capital and the northern city of Aleppo the main commercial hub, Homs with its 1.6 million residents in central Syria represents the country's industrial lifeline.

Activists say the relentless onslaught on the city by government troops that began early on Saturday has left at least 400 people dead despite widespread international condemnation.

The regime of President Bashar Assad, which has repeatedly accused armed "terrorist" groups of fomenting the unrest, has sharply increased its use of tanks, helicopters, mortars, rockets and gunfire to attack civilians in Homs, according to U.N. rights chief Navi Pillay, citing local sources.

Entire areas of the Baba Amr neighborhood have been destroyed in the blitz, in what opposition activists say is a bid by the regime to pave the way for a tank-backed ground assault.

To the east and west of Homs are oil refineries and gas fields, a car assembly line for Iran's Khodro Company (IKPO) as well as a raft of other private industries.

Moreover, Homs is an important road junction, which sees transit goods arriving from the Mediterranean on their way through to Iraq.

But it also sits on a fault-line of sectarian tensions within Syria and is awash with weapons, making the anti-regime protests in Homs particularly significant.

Paradoxically, Homs is home to Syria's first military academy, established by the French in 1932, which trained officers at the forefront of the coup that brought the Baath party to power in 1963, including Assad's late father, Hafez.

Activists have accused the authorities of seeking to aggravate sectarian strife almost since the start of the uprising, pointing to a day in July when some 30 people from different confessional groups were reportedly killed.

The death in custody last April of a Muslim cleric, Sheikh Faraj Abu Mussa, was blamed by the opposition on pro-regime militias, and a spree of sectarian and reprisal killings were also recorded in Homs in late September.

Sunnis consider themselves the true natives of the city and never took kindly to the mass influx of Alawites -- members of a Shiite sect to which Assad also belongs -- to Homs and its surrounding districts since the late 1960s.

Alawites were received with a mixture of contempt and jealousy, because they received far more government and public positions than Sunnis.