The Telegraph has filed a report from the Homs neighbourhood of Bab Amr, which was under bombardment for a month as government forces tried to root out opposition fighters:

Along the main thoroughfares, the blackened holes of the apartment buildings stare down at the piles of broken bricks and burned out cars. Each building has its own sign of war – the smashed shutters of the shopfronts, the collapsed roof, the bedroom exposed to the daylight.

"At first, it seemed like an empty film set. But we walked on, among the first journalists allowed in since the end of one of the most fearsome sieges of modern times, the few hundred residents who have not fled peered out from their broken walls.

"A handful of black-clad women clustered around an outpost of the Red Crescent. A few more gathered around a man who had been allowed by the army to bring in a small selection of vegetables.

"Children pointed excitedly to the ruins, their new playground, running in and out of the piles of detritus."