Bombs rain on Ghouta ahead of UN vote
Resolution on 30-day truce will end one of deadliest bombing campaigns of 7-year war
Anew wave of bombs struck Syria’s eastern Ghouta district unabated yesterday, witnesses said, ahead of a UN Security Council vote to demand a 30day ceasefire to end one of the deadliest bombing campaigns of the seven-year civil war.
For a sixth straight day, warplanes flown by government forces and their allies have pounded the densely populated enclave east of Damascus, the last rebel bastion near the capital.
At least 462 people have been killed and many hundreds injured, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group says. The dead include more than 100 children.
Eyes were on Moscow, and whether President Bashar Al Assad’s veto-wielding ally would support the Security Council’s draft ceasefire resolution, block it, or seek to water it down in a way that would let bombing go on.
The vote, which could clear the way for aid deliveries and medical evacuations, was postponed twice yesterday, diplomats said, amid a flurry of last-minute negotiations on the text drafted by Sweden and Kuwait.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that Moscow wanted guarantees that rebel fighters will not shoot at residential areas in Damascus.
S yrian regime air strikes and artillery fire hit the rebel-held enclave of Eastern Ghouta for a sixth straight day yesterday as the world struggled to reach a deal to stop the carnage.
More than 400 civilians have been killed in one of the sevenyear Syrian conflict’s bloodiest episodes and rescuers were finding more bodies buried in the rubble.
Russia, whose warplanes are also bombing the Eastern Ghouta region, stalled a deal at the United Nations for a 30-day humanitarian ceasefire late Thursday but a vote was rescheduled for later yesterday.
Few of the enclave’s estimated 400,000 residents - mostly living in a scattering of towns across the semi-rural area east of the capital - ventured out yesterday.
An AFP correspondent in Douma, Eastern Ghouta’s main town, saw a handful of people stealthily crossing rubblestrewn streets to assess damage to their property or look for food and water.
Raining death from the sky
But death has fallen from the sky relentlessly since government and allied forces intensified their bombardment on Sunday and rocket fire soon forced everybody to run for cover.
Exhausted and famished families cowered in cramped and damp basements, exchanging information on the latest casualties of the government’s blitz.
Some of the only people braving the threat of more bombardment were medical staff in those hospitals still standing and rescuers sifting through the wreckage of levelled buildings.
The new strikes yesterday killed at least nine people, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
“The air strikes and the artillery fire are continuing on several towns in Eastern Ghouta,” Rami Abdul Rahman, the head of the Britain-based monitoring group, told AFP.
He said that five of the nine people killed yesterday died in air strikes on Douma, the main town in the enclave east of Damascus, and that two of them were children.
The latest deaths brought to 426 the number of people killed since the Syrian regime and its Russian ally intensified their bombardment of the besieged area on February 18. More than 2,000 people have been wounded.
“The death toll is likely to go up, there are many wounded in critical condition and victims trapped in the rubble,” said Abdul Rahman.
Diplomats at the United Nations failed to clinch Russian approval late Thursday on a resolution calling for a 30-day truce to allow for humanitarian aid and medical evacuations.
They then announced that a vote would take place yesterday but did not make clear whether they had rallied Moscow to a new draft.
The latest text softens language in a key provision to say that the council “demands” a ceasefire instead of “decides”.
It also specifies that the ceasefire will not apply to “individuals, groups, undertakings and entities associated” with Al Qaida and Daesh. A previous version simply mentioned the two groups.
World leaders have expressed outrage at the plight of civilians in Eastern Ghouta, which UN chief Antonio Guterres called “hell on earth”, but have so far been powerless to halt the bloodshed.
“The UN says it is concerned and calls for a ceasefire, France condemns, but they have given us nothing,” said Abu Mustafa, one of the few civilians on the streets of Douma yesterday morning.
“Every day we have strikes, destruction. This would draw tears from a rock, there is nobody who hasn’t lost a member of their family,” said the 50-year-old, who was escorting a wounded person to hospital.
The enclave has been controlled by rebels since 2012.
The area is completely surrounded by government-controlled territory and residents are unwilling or unable to flee the deadly siege.
The dire images of civilian victims bleeding to death in understaffed hospitals and the scope of the urban destruction have shocked the world and drawn comparisons with the devastating 2016 battle for Aleppo.
The aid community has voiced its frustration at being prevented from assisting civilians in Eastern Ghouta, which has been under government siege since 2013.
“The blocking of this resolution is another failure to end human suffering in Syria, with the UN Security Council rendered impotent as this senseless war rages on,” Thomas White, Syria director at the Norwegian Refugee Council told AFP.
Government forces have this month reinforced their deployment around the enclave in preparation for a ground offensive that White said would spark an even worse humanitarian crisis.
“It will be bloody, costing the lives of thousands of civilians and potentially the displacement of hundreds of thousands more,” he said.