Syrian forces launch ground attack in Homs Syrian troops advanced towards the besieged district of Baba Amr in Homs on Wednesday, activists said, after more than three weeks of intense shelling of opposition-affiliated areas in Syria's third largest city. A Syrian official told the Associated Press that Baba Amr would be "cleaned" within hours. An activist in Homs told Reuters news agency that the infantry was trying to enter an area on the edge of Baba Amr and that "fierce confrontations with automatic rifles and heavy machine guns" were taking place. "The army is trying to go in with infantry from the direction of al-Bassel football field and fierce confrontations with automatic rifles and heavy machine guns are taking place there," activist Mohammad al-Homsi told Reuters from Homs. It was not possible to reach sources inside Baba Amr to confirm the attempted assault or establish whether or not the army had succeeded in entering the area. Baba Amr has become the focal point for the regime's attempt to crush opposition, and hundreds of civilians are estimated to have died since the shelling campaign started at the beginning of February. The Free Syrian Army, a loosely-affiliated collection of defected soldiers and other armed opponents of the regime, are said to be present in Baba Amr, though the last reports of Marie Colvin, a celebrated correspondent for the UK's Sunday Times who was killed there last week, along with French photographer Remi Ochlik, said the besieged population was overwhelmingly civilian. Hicham Hassan, a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said the violence was making the humanitarian situation more difficult. "This makes it even more important for us to repeat our call for a halt in the fighting," he told Reuters in Geneva. It is essential that people who are in need of evacuation - wounded people, women and children - that we are able to offer them that with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent. The campaign group Avaaz said that activists in Baba Amr had begun recording their wills in anticipation of a ground assault. The violence in Homs came as Kofi Annan, the United Nations-Arab League envoy for Syria, said he would hold talks in New York from Wednesday with Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary-General, and member states on Syria. He will then go to Cairo for talks with Nabil Elaraby, the Arab League head. The UN says Mr Assad's security forces have killed more than 7,500 civilians since the revolt began in March 2011. Western diplomats had drafted text for a new UN Security Council resolution demanding access for humanitarian aid workers to besieged Syrian cities. Two previous attempts at passing a Security Council resolution on Syria were vetoed by China and Russia.