‘WAR CRIMES ON AN EPIC SCALE’
Russian-backed forces bombard Damascus area
After 48 relentless hours of air strikes and artillery shells on the Damascus suburbs, Bassem made the reluctant decision to move his family into the basement of their building, even though he knew it could not protect them.
His baby son was two weeks old and his wife was too weak and malnourished to breastfeed him. Bassem, a 33-year-old anesthetist at one of the few hospitals in the beleaguered suburb of Ghouta, Syria, worried about their health in the poorly ventilated basement.
Deep down, he knew that the makeshift shelter would not hold if it sustained a direct hit with a barrel bomb or a rocket. “It is not a good place for them. It is not healthy, it is not equipped, it is too cold. And I know it isn’t safe if it is hit by a missile. But what else can we do? This is a war of extermination,” said Bassem.
About 400,000 people — half of them children — are trapped in eastern Ghouta as the regime and its Russian allies intensify their air strikes in preparation for what many expect will be a final assault in the coming weeks.
More than 200 civilians have been killed since Sunday in the most intense bombardment in years, according to the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights. At least 57 children are among the dead, the group said, including 15 who were killed on Tuesday alone.
Amnesty International has said “war crimes on an epic scale” are being committed in the rebel-held suburb of Damascus, while the Syrian opposition called the offensive “a bloodbath of innocent women and children.”
In the northern district of Douma, a weary doctor described the frantic effort to treat a seemingly endless stream of bomb victims. A desperate shortage of supplies meant he and other medics reuse disposable medical equipment and dispense expired medicine.
“There are cases where we find someone we thought was dead and they turned out to be alive,” the doctor said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “A baby of 20 months was brought in after an airstrike. He was blue and he wasn’t breathing but his heart was working. I opened his mouth and I found his throat was completely full of sand, back to his tonsils.”
The doctor scooped sand from the infant’s mouth until there was space in his throat for a respirator. The boy began to breathe but it is still not clear if he will survive. The air strike killed his mother and two siblings.
As a coalition of Islamist rebels fight to repel the advance of regime fighters and Iranian-backed militias, thousands of families are sheltering in basements, usually without electricity or running water.
When a bomb falls nearby, a volunteer must venture out to clear rubble from pipes which provide ventilation. Often dozens of people share
WE ARE JUST BREATHING BUT THIS IS NOT LIVING.
a few buckets as lavatories.
Abu Abdelrahman moved his family into one of the basements 16 days ago after their home was destroyed. He is responsible for his wife and three children but also his brother’s widow and son, after his brother was killed in a regime prison at the start of the war.
“I feel suffocated down here but we are lucky because some people have no basement to hide in,” said Abdelrahman. “We are just breathing but this is not living. The situation is worse than your imagination.”
Meanwhile, scores of progovernment gunmen began entering the northern Kurdish enclave of Afrin. Turkish troops shelled the areas shortly after the fighters entered the area.
The move raises the risk of a direct conflict between the two countries and an escalation in the war.
Pro-government forces set out for Afrin to “defend our people against the Turkish aggression,” state-run Syrian television reported. Turkish troops entered Syria on Jan. 20 to expel Kurdish YPG fighters from the border area, viewing them as an extension of the Kurdish PKK separatist group Turkey has fought for decades.