Terrified Syrians wait for next bomb as they sit in Ghouta’s shelters
US ‘remains prepared to act if we must’ • Monitor: Over half a million killed in war
BEIRUT (Reuters) – As the Syrian Army pushes deeper into eastern Ghouta under the cover of a hammering bombardment, some 400,000 civilians who the United Nations says live in the enclave have crowded into dark basements to cower from the ceaseless bombs.
Under cracked ceilings that bulge downward from the force of previous strikes, they string sheets across the basement to partition off rooms for entire families.
“Look at it. It is completely uninhabitable. It is not even safe to put chickens in. There is no bathroom, just one toilet, and there are 300 people,” said a man in a shelter in the region’s biggest urban center, Douma.
Like the other people in the shelter, he did not want to give his name for fear of reprisals as the army attempts to retake the rebel enclave.
US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley warned on Monday that Washington “remains prepared to act if we must,” if the UN Security Council fails to act on Syria.
The United States asked the Security Council to demand an immediate 30-day cease-fire in Damascus and rebel-held eastern Ghouta.
“It is not the path we prefer, but it is a path we have demonstrated we will take, and we are prepared to take again,” Haley told the 15-member Security Council. “When the international community consistently fails to act, there are times when states are compelled to take their own action.”
Also, thousands of families are sleeping in the open in the streets, where there is no longer any room in packed cellars to shelter from government bombardment, local authorities said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitoring group, said on Monday for the first time that the death toll had passed halfa-million people.
It has confirmed the deaths of 511,000 people, it said, and has the names of more than 350,000 of them. About 85% were killed by government forces and their allies, the group said.
Syrian President Bashar Assad and his strongest ally, Russia, have said the onslaught on Eastern Ghouta is needed to end the rule of Islamist insurgents over civilians there and to stop mortar fire on nearby Damascus.
But the intensity of the offensive, which the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says has killed 1,160 people in three weeks, has provoked condemnation from Western countries and pleas from UN agencies for a humanitarian halt.
The assault began with one of the fiercest bombardments of the war, as war planes, helicopters and artillery rained down a near-constant stream of missiles, bombs, rockets and shells.
It targeted an area that has been besieged since 2013, and where dire shortages of food and medicine have caused severe malnutrition and ravaging illness.
After the bombs began to fall three weeks ago, people feared to leave the shelters even to seek the meager remaining supplies of food.
The shelter was in two stories of a basement and very crowded. Small children were everywhere, chatting and playing in the maze-like corridors between the hanging sheets.
Inside the makeshift rooms, thin mattresses and blankets lay on the floor. Some people tried to sleep. In one corner, a man sat up for the arrival of a medic, there to treat the man’s injuries from a previous bomb attack.
Long cuts were visible on his shoulder and the crown of his head, which the medic cleaned.
Small children helped with washing up – rinsing foamy detergent off stainless steel dishes with dirty water from a small jug.
In such conditions, hygiene has become increasingly hard to maintain.
“Three hundred people living in danger and we are forced to live like this... old and young and sick,” said the man.
From another part of the shelter, a man could be heard calling for the mother of a boy who had soiled himself, something people there said had grown more common as fear set in.
Many of the people huddled in Douma’s shelters had already fled from other parts of the enclave, some of them many times over in order to escape the ever-shifting front lines.