I’m not ashamed to say I’m rooting for Assad.

BEIRUT (AP) — Backed by warplanes, Syrian government troops pushed Thursday into the central districts of the city of Homs in an effort to oust rebels from the country’s third largest urban center, activists said.

The regime pounded rebel-held districts with artillery and carried out at least one airstrike on a residential neighborhood, killing seven people, four of them children, said the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

President Bashar Assad’s troops regained control of the Wadi Sayeh district in the center of Homs early Thursday morning, the Observatory said. The neighborhood is strategically important for the government as its forces try to dislodge opposition fighters from several central districts that have been under rebel control for more than a year.

In the northern city of Aleppo, rebels overran the headquarters of Assad’s anti-terrorism forces, according to the Aleppo Media Center activists group. The building’s capture was the latest in a string of rebel victories in Syria’s largest city, where opposition fighters are trying to expand their hold.

The building is located near the central prison where many of Assad’s opponents, activists and their family members are believed to be held. Rebel fighters have for weeks battled government troops in the area in an attempt to storm the facility and free the prisoners.

Update:

BEIRUT – Forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad retook a central district in the city of Homs on Thursday, driving a wedge between two isolated pockets of rebel resistance in Syria’s third largest city, fighters and activists said.

The recapture of Wadi al-Sayeh, which links the besieged rebel stronghold in Khalidiyah to the opposition-held old city, appears to be part of a series of carefully focused counter-offensives that mark a shift from the indiscriminate campaigns earlier in the two-year-old conflict.

Homs is a link in the corridor connecting Assad’s Damascus powerbase with the traditional Mediterranean heartland of his minority Alawite community. It was an early center of the mainly Sunni Muslim uprising against four decades of Assad family rule.

Following recent gains in rural areas around Homs, Assad’s forces surrounded the towns of Baida and Maqreb on the road to the coastal city of Banias on Thursday, activists said, the latest stage in a campaign to secure the corridor.