[An Nahar] Syrian troops pounded several districts of the central city of Homs on Wednesday and clashed with rebels as at least 48 people were killed in violence across the country, activists and a watchdog said.Regime forces killed 12 people in Daraa, nine in the countryside around Damascus
...The place where Pencilneck hangs his brass hat...
, eight in Idlib, seven in Aleppo
...For centuries, Aleppo was Greater Syria's largest city and the Ottoman Empire's third, after Constantinople and Cairo. Although relatively close to Damascus in distance, Aleppans regard Damascenes as country cousins...
, five in Deir Ezzor, three in Homs, two in Damscus, one in Latakia and one in Hama, the opposition Local Coordination Committees reported.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said regime troops rained shells on the besieged, rebel-held district of Khaldiyeh in Homs, killing two civilians and wounding seven others.
It said living conditions in Khaldiyeh were deteriorating.
Other areas of Homs also saw fierce violence, as regime forces pounded the districts of Sultaniyeh and Jobar, where families trapped by the fighting "are like the living dead," an activist from the central city told Agence La Belle France Presse via Skype.
"Regime forces shell the Sultaniyeh and Jobar districts daily," said the activist, who identified himself as Abu Bakr.
"Life is down to a bare minimum," in the impoverished neighborhoods of Sultaniyeh and Jobar and the districts have been without electrical power for days, said Abu Bakr.
Most of the residents have fled but "families that remain here are like the living dead," he added.
"Usually you have four or five families huddling in a ground-floor apartment ready to flee when the shelling starts," he said.
Rebels and troops also clashed on Wednesday around the neighborhood of Baba Amr -- once a rebel held district which was reclaimed by the Syrian army in March after a month-long campaign of relentless shelling, Abu Bakr said.
"Free Syrian Army battalions are fighting regime troops every day around Baba Amr, trying to retake the district," he said.
Syrian troops and rebels also clashed at dawn at Jaramana, a suburb south of the capital, Damascus, the Britannia-based Observatory reported.
The fighting erupted near a branch of the feared air force intelligence service, the watchdog said.
Elsewhere, six non-combatants were killed in the northwestern province of Idlib, including four who were ambushed and killed by soldiers in the village of Maaret al-Numan, the site of frequent violence, the Observatory added.
Of those killed on Wednesday, four were rebels and the rest civilians, the Observatory said.
The latest deaths came a day after violence killed 69 people -- 36 civilians, 25 troops and eight rebels, the Observatory said.