Supplies are growing short for the more than 28,000 people in Homs’ Baba Amr district trying to survive the assault by government forces, M&C reported, citing DPA.

Since Saturday, February 5, around 500 shells a day have rained down on the neighborhood, killing men, women and children in their homes.

Dozens of snipers shoot from the rooftops at everything that moves. The streets are deserted, the only vehicles moving are carrying the wounded or dead.

The 40 army checkpoints surrounding the city have prevented supplies from entering the city for the past 10 days. Food, medicine and heating fuel are growing scarce, as daytime temperatures approach freezing in the Syrian winter.

There are only three doctors for the whole of Homs, and one was wounded by a shell that hit a makeshift hospital.

In one of the hospitals, staff step around the growing number of bodies on the floor to reach the treatment room, where two nurses tend to a dozen injured, with inadequate medical supplies.

The city has been neglected in recent years, with almost no infrastructure investment from the state, widespread corruption and unemployment at 37 per cent even before the riots.

The government has dispatched special forces to Homs, to lead the army in an imminent storming of the city, says Walid al Kader, a colonel with the rebel Free Syrian Army. “They have tried before but we were able to stop the offensive,” he says.