100 die as Syria seizes 70% of rebel enclave
adra (syria) — Air strikes killed dozens of civilians in Eastern Ghouta and forced thousands to flee their homes on Friday as Syrian and allied forces pressed their blistering assault on the sixyear-old rebel stronghold.
At least 100 people were killed as the toll for the monthold assault near Damascus continued to mount and world powers remained unable to stop one of the seven-year conflict’s worst crises.
The war entered its eighth year with another deadly assault unfolding in the north, where Turkish-led forces pressed an operation to seize the Kurdish-majority region of Afrin, sending thousands more civilians on to the roads.
The Syrian army and allied forces have recaptured 70 per cent of the territory that had been under insurgent control in the enclave of eastern Ghouta, a military statement said. Troops had seized swathes of farmland, several villages and some towns, it added.
The Syrian army, in a message broadcast on state television, urged all residents to use “corridors” to leave the enclave.
BEIRUT — Syrian government and Russian air strikes killed at least 46 people in a besieged town outside of Damascus on Friday, while Turkish shelling and attacks on a Kurdish-held town in northern Syria left at least 22 dead there, monitors and officials said.
The staggering death toll — at least 68 civilians killed — came a day after Syria passed the seven-year mark in its relentless civil war.
In Damascus’ rebel-held enclave of eastern Ghouta, Syrian and Russian jets struck the town of Kafr Batna with cluster bombs, napalm-like incendiary weapons, and conventional explosives, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The assault was part of an indiscriminate campaign by President Bashar Assad’s forces to retake the town and the rest of the enclave from the rebels.
A medical charity supporting hospitals in the Ghouta region, the Syrian American Medical Society, said doctors in Kafr Batna were treating patients for severe burn wounds. The charity said it recorded 40 casualties on Friday. The Syrian Civil Defence search-andrescue group said it identified 42 bodies so far.
Oways Al Shami, a spokesman for Syrian Civil Defence, also
I am myself with many humanitarian workers on the ground both exhausted and fed up with the blind justification of gross violations against civilians Peter Maurer, ICRC president
known as the White Helmets, said he expected the toll to rise further. “Most of the (bodies) were charred,” he said.
Exhausted and shell-shocked civilians streamed out of eastern Ghouta for the second consecutive day to buses arranged by the government to take them to a centre for identification and relief.
A man interviewed on state-affiliated Al Ikhbariya TV said he had gone two days without food. Others said rebels hoarded food and humiliated civilians, even shooting people trying to leave.
The UN has warned of a malnutrition crisis in eastern Ghouta, which human rights groups have blamed on the government’s strangling blockade.
Russia’s Defence Ministry said close to 5,000 civilians have been evacuated on Friday, after more than 10,000 left the enclave the before.
The assault on eastern Ghouta has devastated towns across the region and damaged and destroyed over a dozen hospitals. At least 1,300 civilians have been killed under shelling and air strikes.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the Russian military and the Syrian government would extend a “ceasefire” in Damascus’ rebel-held suburbs as long as it takes to allow all the civilians to leave the area.
In northern Syria, where Kurdish officials Turkish shelling and air strikes killed at least 22 civilians on Friday in the town of Afrin, the Turkish military urged civilians to leave and the Syrian Kurdish militiamen to surrender to besieging Turkish forces.
The media office for the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led and US-backed force that operates in the Kurdish autonomous region in the north, said also that at least 30 were wounded in Friday’s attacks.
Victims lay dead the streets in pools of blood, according to a video from the Observatory, which monitors Syria’s seven-year civil war and which put the death toll at 18. — AP