On his return to the UK, British Ambassador to Syria Simon Collis:  ”We are now at a situation where the [syrian] regime has continued after 7,000 deaths, well over 10,000 detained and many people tortured. They have escalated their tactics and reached a stage where they’re using heavy artillery rockets to fire in to civilian area. It has been a policy of violence from the beginning which has steadily intensified until there’s a kind of mini Stalingrad that we’ve seen in Homs over the last month.”

From the FCO Website