BEIRUT — Attacks by forces loyal to the Syrian government have killed over a hundred people in a rebel-held Damascus suburb, aid agencies and monitoring groups said on Tuesday, calling it one of the bloodiest 24 hour periods in Syria’s seven-year war.
People cowered in their basements and doctors worked around the clock as warplanes pounded the cluster of towns and villages east of Damascus known as Ghouta, which has been surrounded by government forces for the past four years.
Even by the standards of Ghouta, the opposition’s isolated last bastion outside the capital, the latest assault has been brutal. Just last month, government warplanes killed at least 210 people and sent hundreds fleeing to what remained of the hospitals.
In the current attack, hospitals appeared to be the target, with more than five of them hit on Monday, according to the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations (UOSSM). The France-based medical charity put the toll of the strikes on Monday at 97 dead and over 500 injured.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said an additional 45 people have been killed so far in continued bombardments on Tuesday, adding that this brings to 190 the number who have died since the stepped up attacks began late on Sunday.
“The sheer intensity of airstrikes is leveling the city and killing civilians without any regard or mercy,” said Zedoun Al Zoebi, the head of UOSSM, who said the attacks of the past 24 hours amounted to the worst of the war. “Medicine and medical supplies have not been allowed into the city for months now, and there is virtually no medical care available for these people as they suffer severe trauma wounds.”
[Starved and abandoned, rebel-held Damascus suburb braces for new attacks]
The rebels retaliated by firing shells into the city of Damascus, killing a civilian and injuring nine on Tuesday, in addition to 15 who were injured on Monday, according to the state news agency SANA.
The United Nations warned that the situation in Ghouta is “spiraling out of control” and issued an urgent appeal for a cease-fire.
“It’s imperative to end this senseless human suffering now. Such targeting of innocent civilians and infrastructure must stop now,” said the UN’s regional humanitarian coordinator for Syria, Panos Moumtzis.
But with the international community increasingly disengaging from efforts to stop seven years of bloodshed in Syria and the world increasingly immune to the ticktock reports of death and suffering, the appeal likely will have little chance of being heard.
Expressing the frustration of many of those involved in trying to raise awareness of the plight of civilians in Syria, the U.N.’s children’s agency UNICEF issued a blank statement. “We no longer have the words to describe children’s suffering and our outrage,” the agency added, by way of explanation.
The violence coincided with a renewed attempt by the government to recapture the Ghouta enclave, which fell under rebel control in 2012 and has been under siege since 2013, meaning that food and medical supplies are both scarce and expensive. Forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have been gathering for days on the outskirts of Eastern Ghouta, raising fears that a final assault on the enclave, one of the largest still in rebel hands, may be imminent.
Residents said that they were staying inside their houses, often gathered in a single room in the hope that they could help each other if bombs struck the building. One photograph, circulated by activists on Monday, appeared to show the bodies of five members of a single family, the children wrapped in their dressing gowns, one of them cuddling up to a woman who appeared to be their mother.
“I haven’t slept in almost 24 hours. The artillery and rockets are targeting the area nonstop, there have been many massacres,” said Huda Khayati, a relief worker with the Syrian nonprofit Women Now for Development, reached by phone.
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