By Khaled Yacoub Oweis and Angus MacSwan
February 22, 2012 10:00 PM EST
(Reuters) - Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces rained rockets and bombs down on opposition-held neighborhoods of the city of Homs, reducing buildings to rubble and killing more than 80 people, including two Western journalists.
The barrages marked an intensification of a nearly three-week offensive to crush resistance in Homs, one of the focal points of a nationwide uprising against Assad's 11-year rule, and prompted further international condemnation.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy described the deaths of the two journalists, French photographer Remi Ochlik and American Marie Colvin of Britain's Sunday Times, as an assassination and said the Assad era had to end.
"That's enough now," Sarkozy said. "This regime must go and there is no reason that Syrians don't have the right to live their lives and choose their destiny freely. If journalists were not there, the massacres would be a lot worse."
France and Britain demanded that three other Western journalists wounded in the strike on a house in Homs be given the medical care they urgently needed.
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More than 60 bodies, both rebel fighters and civilians, were recovered from one area of Homs' Baba Amro, a Sunni Muslim district opposed to Syria's Alawite ruling class, after an afternoon bombardment on Wednesday. Some 21 were killed earlier in the day, activists said.
"Helicopters flew reconnaissance overhead then the bombardment started," Homs activist Abu Abei told Reuters.
Videos uploaded by opposition activists showed smashed buildings, deserted streets, and doctors treating wounded civilians in primitive conditions in Baba Amro, the main target of Assad's wrath.
TARGETED?
The two journalists were killed when the house in which they were staying after sneaking over the Lebanese border into Homs was hit by rockets. Sunday Times editor John Witherow said Colvin, a veteran war reporter, and her colleagues may have been deliberately targeted.
"They certainly knew that she was there from her reports and broadcasting. And the question is, could they use technology or other means to identify exactly where she and some other journalists were hiding?" Witherow said on BBC television.
"It seems to me perfectly reasonable to assume that they would have targeted them."
The last dispatch from Colvin - who wore a trademark black eye-patch since being wounded in Sri Lanka in 2001 - described the misery inside Baba Amro.
Women and children were crammed together into a basement, huddled in fear and a two-year-old child had died in front of her, she reported on British radio.
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