Syrian assault spurs call for intervention The Syrian regime's intensifying assault on the rebellious city of Homs killed dozens of people on Wednesday including two western journalists, sparking fresh pleas for international action to stop the bloodshed. As international powers prepared to meet on Friday to discuss Syria's crisis, foreign news agencies reported that the near-three week long bombardment of the country's third city had claimed as many as 80 more lives, among them Marie Colvin, the prominent war correspondent, and Remi Ochlik, a French photojournalist. The latest deaths will increase the international pressure for measures to end the killing by President Bashar al-Assad's forces. The regime's assault on Homs only intensified after China and Russia vetoed a UN Security Council resolution this month endorsing an Arab League plan to end the violence. "Where is the UN?" asked one Syrian activist. We are not animals. We are human. Simply, we request freedom. Rami Abdulrahman of the London-based Syrian Human Rights Observatory, said 26 people were killed in Wednesday's assault on the Bab Amr neighbourhood of Homs. At least 6,000 had been killed nationwide since the uprising against the Assad regime began almost a year ago. Activists said Ms Colvin and Mr Ochlik were killed when the house in which they were sheltering in Bab Amr was hit by Syrian fire. The civilian area was defended by only a few lightly equipped members of the fragmented military wing of the opposition known as the Free Syrian Army. Activists said two other foreign journalists were also injured in the attack, which took place a day after the killing of Rami Alsayeed, a Syrian citizen journalist whose widely viewed live webstream broadcasts of Bab Amr showed the ferocity of the government assault. Victoria Nuland, US state department spokeswoman, said the western journalists" deaths were "another example of the shameless brutality of the Assad regime." The scale of the killing in Homs raises the stakes for a new international group of so-called "Friends of Syria," which is dominated by anti-Assad western and Middle Eastern powers and is due to meet in Tunis on Friday to plan what to do in the absence of a UN mandate. Even states which would like to see the fall of the Assad regime, a strong ally of Iran, have shied away from intervening militarily because of the potential destructiveness of a full-scale war in a country at the geographical and political heart of the Middle East. In its strongest statement yet, the opposition Syrian National Council said it was coming to the conclusion that foreign military help was needed. The campaign organisation Avaaz called on the Friends of Syria to impose an urgent humanitarian ceasefire in Homs, where Avaaz says more than 20,000 people are trapped under bombardment without access to medical care. Reports filed by Ms Colvin - who worked for Britain's Sunday Times for more than 25 years - conveyed the desperate humanitarian situation in Homs. Among her last work was a graphic account, captured on video broadcast on CNN on Tuesday, of the death of a baby boy killed in the city by shell fire. Asked on CNN about the Syrian regime's claims that it did not target civilians, she said: "It's a complete and utter lie that they are only going after terrorists . . .