Activists in Daraya said the Assad regime’s helicopters have dropped no fewer than 50 barrel bombs on the district since the early hours of Saturday, causing massive damage to civilian homes and infrastructure. The bombing has put the only remaining field hospital in the rebel-held district out of service.
The activists said that some of the barrel bombs that hit Daraya were filled with napalm, an internationally banned weapon causing massive fires that are very hard to extinguish.
The Assad regime’s intense bombing of Daraya has been concentrated on vital civilian facilities, such as the civil defense center and field hospitals. The only field hospital in the Damascus suburb temporarily went out of service on Tuesday when it was hit with barrel bombs containing napalm. The hospital went completely out of service after it was bombed by four missiles late on Friday, leaving nearly 8,300 civilians trapped in the district without access to basic medical services.
In a statement released on Friday, the local council in Daraya called upon the United Nations to take concrete action in order to stop Assad’s genocidal war on the Syrian people; immediately stop indiscriminate bombardment; and ensure the delivery of humanitarian and medical aid to civilians trapped inside Daraya.
The council stressed that the UN absolute silence as well as lack of political and legal pressure required to stop the deliberate targeting of vital civilian infrastructure in Syria is evidence of a new low the international community has reached. The council criticized the absence of humanitarian and ethical responses to the atrocious crimes carried out by the Assad regime and its allies against the Syrian people.
To continue to ignore the regime’s atrocities demonstrates the dysfunctional the UN laws and institutions, mainly the UN Security Council whose supposed purpose is to maintain international peace and security, the statement said. The UN has shamefully been unable to protect the Syrian people or to hold perpetrators of war crimes in Syria to account over the past five years, the statement added. (Source: Syrian Coalition)
