Syrian defence minister tours Homs district

Syrian Defence Minister Fahd al-Freij visited army troops in Khaldiyeh, a Homs district the army won back from rebel control in late July, state news agency SANA said on Monday. The general conducted "a tour of Khaldiyeh, where he visited the army units that had restored security and stability in the neighbourhood," SANA said. The army's takeover of Khaldiyeh, in the central city of Homs, came after an intense month-long campaign of daily air and artillery shellings. Like other districts under rebel control in Homs, Khaldiyeh had been under a suffocating army siege for more than a year. The army's takeover of Khaldiyeh was its second military success since June when it captured the rebel-held town of Qusayr in Homs province with help from Lebanon's Shiite movement Hezbollah. Freij's visit comes a day after President Bashar al-Assad said the country's crisis could only be solved by "striking terror with an iron fist". Homs city, dubbed by rebels the "capital of the revolution", straddles a route linking Damascus to the Mediterranean coast and the Alawite hinterland of Assad's Alawite minority community. More than 100,000 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in Syria's 28-month war, the UN says. Millions more have been forced by violence to flee their homes.