Blasts Hit Syria's Aleppo as Tanks Roll into Homs

(NewsCore) - Twin explosions rocked the northern city of Aleppo Friday, signaling a new shift in Syria's relentless violence as residents of the besieged enclave of Homs were reported telling their loved ones goodbye and preparing to die.

Both rebels and the government blamed each other for the mid-morning car bomb blasts in Aleppo, Syria's commercial center, which killed 28 and injured 235, according to state television.

Sky News reported that wealthier Sunni merchant classes there had been longtime supporters of President Bashar al Assad and the attacks, which shattered the city's relative stability, represented an ominous shift in the country's spiraling violence.

State television broadcast gruesome photos of mangled bodies in pools of blood amid rows of shattered buildings, AFP said. Emergency workers held up body parts, including hands, feet and a torso.

Meanwhile, Syrian troops who have been pounding Homs for the past six days made their first move on the ground to seize one of its neighborhoods, Sky News reported.

Troops backed by tanks pushed into the district of Inshaat and are thought to have gone house to house detaining people.

A Sky correspondent who had been outside Homs and is now in Lebanon, said families there had been making preparations to die ahead of an anticipated major government offensive and were saying goodbye to loved ones.

He said the opposition Free Syrian Army believed there would be a sweep by government troops through the countryside to the Lebanese border and that rebel forces believed more than 10,000 government troops were being deployed.

Anti-government troops were pitifully short of ammunition and counting bullets as they handed them out.

Activists also reported that security forces deployed outside mosques across Syria Friday, firing on worshipers in some areas, to prevent demonstrations called to denounce Russia's support for the Assad regime, AFP said.

In Washington, US lawmakers introduced a resolution Friday calling for the United States to give "substantial material and technical" aid to the outgunned rebel forces.

Senators Bob Casey, a Democrat, and Marco Rubio, a Republican, unveiled the non-binding measure, which also "strongly condemns" Russia and Iran "for providing military and security equipment" being used by government forces.

While Syrian state television blamed the Aleppo blasts on "armed terrorist gangs," and said they represented proof the government faced a violent army, rebels charged they were, in fact, the work of the government.

According to the anti-government forces, Assad's regime wanted to divert attention from its military operations against civilians in Homs.

Russia on Friday accused the West of stoking the violence in the country.

"The Syrian leadership has assured us of its readiness to quickly hold a referendum on a new constitution and move toward elections," Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told the Itar-Tass news agency.