Syrian Opposition-held Eastern Ghouta Suffers Bloodiest Week Since 2015

12 February 2018

EsinIslam And Agencies

The Syrian opposition-held area Eastern Ghouta of Damascus has suffered its bloodiest week since 2015 as a result of government bombardment, with 229 people killed in the last four days, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Friday.

'During the past four days 229 people were killed in Eastern Ghouta villages, including 58 children and 43 women,' Rami Abdulrahman, the head of the Britain-based war monitor, told Reuters.

'These are the worst four days that Eastern Ghouta has ever gone through,' said Hamza, an overwhelmed doctor at the Erbin clinic who was treating wounded patients.

'From 2011 until now, there has never been the level of bombardment we've seen in the last 96 hours.'

'Children and teachers are terrified that at any moment they could be hit. The siege means there is nowhere for them to escape,' said Sonia Khush, Save the Children's Syria response director.

'There must be an immediate halt to the fighting and an end to the siege.'

Moayad al-Hafi, a rescue worker, said his team was targeted as they retrieved bodies near Erbin.

'As we were pulling out the children and the dead from under the rubble, they targeted us with five rockets -- directly targeting us,' said Hafi, 24.

AFP correspondents said mortars were raining down on Bab Touma on Thursday night.

Eastern Ghouta was one of several so-called de-escalation zones agreed last year by three of the main outside players in the conflict -- Turkey, Iran and Russia.

Ankara announced Thursday it would host a new three-way summit to revive efforts to end the war, which has killed at least 340,000 people and displaced millions since 2011.

Recent attempts to bring the conflict's protagonists and brokers to the table have floundered, but the U.N. made a fresh call this week for conflicting sides to halt fighting.

The United States backed the plea but Russia -- a longtime ally of the Assad regime -- shrugged it off.

'That is not realistic,' Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia told reporters at the U.N.

Civilian Death Toll Increases In Eastern Ghouta Amid Intensified Regime Attacks

Syrian regime air strikes killed six civilians including two children overnight in Eastern Ghouta after a day of respite from deadly bombardment of the opposition enclave, a monitor said yesterday. Since February 5, Bashar Assad's regime has intensified its bombardment of the besieged region outside Damascus, killing more than 245 civilians including dozens of children.

After the ease up of its strikes on Eastern Ghouta for one day, the regime raids picked up again on Saturday night, killing six civilians and wounding more than 50 others, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said, as reported by AFP. Five of those, including two children, were killed in the region's main town of Douma, Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights on Saturday called for international action to stop one of the bloodiest period of the Syrian conflict. The Syrian people are suffering 'though one of the most violent periods in nearly seven years of conflict,' said the U.N. statement, according to Anadolu Agency.

Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein said in a statement: ''The past week has been one of the bloodiest periods of the entire conflict, with wave after wave of deadly air strikes leading to civilian casualties in areas of Eastern Ghouta and Idlib.' 'Over 1,000 civilian casualties from airstrikes were reported in the first week of February alone.'

The statement added some 350,000 people are trapped in Eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, where 210 civilians have been killed including more than 50 children and 42 women from Feb. 5-8.

At least nine medical facilities, six of them in Idlib and three in Eastern Ghouta, were hit by recent air strikes, he said. He added that death and destruction in Idlib, Eastern Ghouta and Damascus constitute war crimes.

About allegations that the Syrian regime used chemical weapons in Idlib, Hussein said the U.N. had received reports, including a video footage suggesting toxic agents may have been used during strikes on a residential area in eastern Saraqab city on Feb. 4.

Syria has been locked in a devastating civil war since March 2011, when the Assad regime cracked down on pro-democracy protests with unexpected ferocity. While U.N. officials say hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in the conflict, Syrian regime officials say the death toll is closer to 10,000. 

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