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As Russia Pushes Diplomacy, Syrian Forces Are Said to Pound Homs From New York Times of February 8, 2012 窗体顶端 MOSCOW—Fresh from talks with President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, Russia’s foreign minister announced on Wednesday that Syria’s vice president would seek to open talks with opposition forces in the country and called on Western and Arab leaders to support such efforts. U.S. Closes Syrian Embassy TimesCast | U.S. Closes Syrian Embassy “We consider this willingness to be an important factor to be taken into consideration and hope that all who have some kind of influence over the opposition will urge them to begin such dialogue,” Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov said at a news conference in Moscow, according to Russian media reports. At the same time, Turkey, a major regional player neighboring Syria was said to be weighing its own initiative toward securing a broad consensus on ending the violence. A day after the Syria-Russia talks, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was planning to discuss the crisis by phone with President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia, according to the Turkish Foreign Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu. The diplomacy seemed to have no immediate impact on the fighting. News reports said that for the fifth straight day Syrian troops bombed civilian areas of the city of Homs and attacked other areas in the province of Idlib in the north, Daraa in the south and the mountain town of Zabadani. Reuters said government forces in Homs used tanks, rockets and mortars to subdue resistance and quoted activists as saying almost 50 people had been killed in the latest attacks. The death toll could not be independently confirmed. The onslaught was described by activists as an apparent attempt by the authorities to make good on their threat to crush all resistance — a bloody counterpoint to the diplomatic maneuvering as Mr. Assad faced mounting international isolation. Mr. Lavrov visited Damascus on Tuesday at the head of a high-ranking delegatio