Ghouta mourners killed in airstrike
‘Campaign of annihilation,’ UN says
The crowd had gathered at a makeshift cemetery in Douma, a neighbourhood of Eastern Ghouta, to say a few brief prayers and bury seven people killed in a bomb blast that morning.
The mourners separated the corpses — three children, three teenage boys, and one elderly man — with cinder blocks and laid wooden slabs across the blocks to create a new tier for the next set of bodies to come.
As they began laying the bodies into the earth, a jet streaked overhead and fired a rocket into the crowd.
Friends and family leaped into the open graves for safety but when the smoke cleared 11 of their number had been killed. Seven deaths had suddenly become 18.
“We don’t have time to bury any one person, to dig him a grave and to honour him” said Abu Abdelrahman, a father-of-three who was at the graveyard during the airstrike. “We just say a quick prayer for everybody and then go back.”
No one knows how many people will be in those mass graves, or buried under the rubble of their homes, by the end of Bashar al- Assad’s assault on Eastern Ghouta, the last rebel-held suburb of Damascus.
The Syrian leader’s pilots and artillery crews work diligent shifts, according to residents speaking after four days of relentless attacks. They begin their bombardment at around 6 a. m. and silence their guns at midnight, giving the 400,000 trapped civilians in Eastern Ghouta a few hours’ respite.
At least 310 people have been killed since Sunday and more than 1,550 have been wounded, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Dozens of children are among the dead.
One man sounded weary and resigned when The Daily Telegraph reached him by WhatsApp in the basement where he and his family were hiding. “I think the picture is clear now. Look at the photos of body parts on Facebook, they express what I want to say,” he said.
For many observers of Syria’s seven years of war, the siege feels like a bleak and repetitive sequel to the battle for Aleppo, which ended in 2016.
Zeid Ra’ad al- Hussein, the UN’s human rights chief, called the onslaught a “monstrous campaign of annihilation.” The UN secretary general has pleaded for a ceasefire and the Security Council is expected to meet this week to discuss the situation and vote on a possible resolution.
But previous efforts to secure a truce in Eastern Ghouta have foundered in the face of Russian objections and threats of a veto.
Jaish al- Islam, one of the main rebel groups in Eastern Ghouta, said it was trying to negotiate a local ceasefire in discussions with Russia but so far had been unsuccessful.