Red Cross calls for pause in violence in Syria to deliver aid

Two Iranian warships called at a Syrian port on Monday as a senior Iranian lawmaker's denouncement of American calls for arming the Syrian opposition added to the international tensions over the Syrian government's crackdown, which has almost run a year.

As president Bashar al-Assad's forces continued pounding opposition strongholds, the International Committee of the Red Cross said it was trying to negotiate a brief pause in the violence to deliver aid to the most devastated areas.

Activist groups reporting intensification of attacks on the besieged Baba Amr neighborhood in the central city of Homs, said the government's inability to crush the opposition there even after weeks of bombardment could be preventing the military from striking deeper and harder into other parts of the country where armed resistance and rebellion are said to be growing, which includes Hama and Idlib Province to the north.

The protesters have been provided a measure of security by armed rebels in places like Hama, which Assad's father, Hafez al-Assad leveled 30 years ago to put down an uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood, in an operation that killed at least 10,000 people. A YouTube video on Monday shows several hundred people jumping and dancing in Halfaya, a neighborhood of Hama, which according to the video, was a regular ''morning protest.''

However, over 50 checkpoints divide up the city, according to the Local Coordination Committees, a grass-roots group that organises and documents protests. Security forces have, meanwhile detained more than 500 people there in the past three weeks.

The living conditions in Hama, Homs and other hard-hit areas, including two suburbs of Damascus, Zabadani and Madaya, have become  increasingly grim, and in Hom supplies of food, baby formula, medicine and potable water were all running out, according to a spokeswoman for the committees, who said two weeks ago they sent 200 cans of baby milk into Homs, but that could hardly meet 10 per cent of the needs.