If the ceasefire agreement in Homs goes through and rebel fighters leave, the capture of the Syrian city will be a significant victory for Bashar al-Assad, weeks before presidential elections set for June 3.
Mr. Assad’s forces have been engaged in gruelling urban warfare to wrest the city back. For the past months, rebels were isolated and blockaded inside a string of Homs neighbourhoods centred around its historic old quarters, battered by heavy government airstrikes and artillery.
An Associated Press team in Homs on Friday said it was unusually quiet, with no shots fired from either side.
“This isn’t what we wanted,” a Homs-based opposition activist, Beibars Tilawi, said of the ceasefire in a Skype interview with Associated Press . “But it’s all we could get.”
The deal is also a face-saving measure for the rebels. It calls for a 48-hour truce in rebel-held parts of Homs, after which, hundreds of fighters holed up in the area will be evacuated to opposition-held areas north of the city, said Mr. Tilawi and another activist who uses the name Thaer Khalildiya — who is based in countryside north of Homs.
News of the ceasefire deal was also reported by the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict, and the Al-Manar TV channel, owned by the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah, allied to Mr. Assad, as well as by Lebanese channel Al-Mayadeen .
There was no immediate comment by Syrian officials.
The 48-hour truce began on Friday, said Mr. Tilawi and Mr. Khalidiya, and the Syrian Observatory. The Observatory bases its information from a network of activists on the ground.
The agreement came weeks after pro-government forces began attacking the rebel-held parts of Homs, which were already badly weakened by a blockade. Rebels outside Homs did not come to the aid of the fighters within. Despairing, hundreds of fighters at the time surrendered to Assad-loyal forces, activists said.
But a hardcore group remained fighting, dispatching explosive-rigged cars into government controlled areas, killing dozens of people, mostly civilians.
Most recently, a double car bombing on Tuesday killed over 50 people in the government-controlled area of Homs.
Also on Friday, two suicide bombings in villages of the nearby province of Hama killed 18 people, State-run television and activists reported.
