Syrian army troops on Wednesday shelled the Homs district of Khaldiyeh, a day after at least 14 civilians were killed in heavy bombardment, an activist in the city said.

"Khaldiyeh is being bombed, with shells and rockets, for a second day," Hadi Abdullah of the Syrian Revolution General Commission told AFP by telephone in the Lebanese capital.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group, said 14 civilians were killed in Khaldiyeh on Tuesday.

Abdullah said he feared a repeat of the month-long battering of Homs' Baba Amr district before the army moved in on 1 March following a "tactical withdrawal" by rebel fighters of the Free Syrian Army.

"That would be a catastrophe," he said.

Abdullah said thousands of residents who fled Baba Amr and other parts of the flashpoint city in central Syria had taken refuge in Khaldiyeh, "the last front left" in Homs.

On 12 March, almost 50 bodies of women and children were uncovered in Homs in what opposition activists called a "massacre" by regime forces. State television said it was the work of "armed terrorist gangs."