Syrian rebels vow to fight on after Qusayr defeat Ken Roth, director of Human Rights Watch, called on President Bashar al-Assad to make good on a promise the regime made on Sunday to allow the Red Cross into the town once military operations were complete. Rebels resisted the regime attack on Qusayr for 16 days, longer than initially expected, inflicting heavy casualties on Hizbollah fighters whose funerals have become a dramatic and unaccustomed sight in Lebanon in recent days. But state media was triumphant in reporting the victory. "We will not hesitate to crush with an iron fist those who attack us," a statement attributed to Syrian armed forces command said. Their fate is surrender or death. We will continue our string of victories until we regain every inch of Syrian land. Earlier in the week, rebels had fought to recapture parts of the Dabaa military airbase to the north of the town, and were able to secure an exit. The regime said it had deliberately left open an escape route to encourage fighters to flee. It then opened an intense bombardment on Tuesday. One activist said that 30 shells were landing a minute, with more than 100 Scuds and other surface-to-surface missiles hitting during the day. Nasser al-Nahar, commander of the Baba Amr Rebels brigade, told The Daily Telegraph from the town: "It was a massive attack and the Free Syrian Army doesn't have the capabilities to stand against such firepower and air strikes. They are implementing a scorched earth policy. He said it was impossible for poorly armed fighters to get close to the regime's tanks and artillery. By Wednesday morning, pro-regime media was showing tanks rolling into the centre of town, and troops raising the Syrian flag, including over the clock tower. Television footage showed a town smashed and partly levelled. "Yesterday the regime and Hizbollah destroyed the city, and what happened in Chechnya has now been repeated in Qusayr," Mohammed, a Qusayr activist said. The pictures on state TV are showing a totally destroyed city, a ghost city. There is no one inside, so where is their victory? They just won stones. However, if the regime manages to secure the area it will have control of both the north-south and west-east supply lines in central-western Syria, allowing them to connect more easily with their forces in Aleppo and Homs cities and also giving easy access to Hizbollah reinforcements. "He who controls Qusayr controls the centre of the country and he who controls the centre of the country controls the whole of Syria," a regime brigadier, Yahya Suleiman, said on Lebanese television. Gad al-Yamani, another activist, said: "The fall of Qusayr means the fall of Homs, whether we like it or not, as reinforcements will come from Lebanon easily." The rebels still hold two districts of Homs city. Lebanon itself will be on even higher alert than usual. General Selim Idriss, head of the rebel military command, told the BBC he reserved the right to strike back against Hizbollah inside Lebanon's borders. Hizbollah joined in the triumph, holding victory rallies in Shia villages inside Lebanon near the border. Mr Nahar said his men would now return to classic insurgency operations in the villages around Qusayr, and called for western support. "They call us an army but we are only guerrilla groups," he said. The Free Syrian Army should be supported with quality weapons, anti-aircraft weapons, anti-tank weapons. We are fighting in an unorganised manner. We're not that effective on the ground. Mr Yamani said fighting was continuing on Wednesday night, but that rebels were running out of supplies. "A lot of fighters are still resisting," he said. But the regime is intensifying its use of heavy weapons to the extent that people saying sarcastically that there are so many missiles they are hitting each other.