As fighting continued for the 16th day, the suffering hundreds of civilians trapped in the areas that are still under the control of the ISIS extremist group south of the capital Damascus has further increased amid the deterioration of the humanitarian situation because of the continued bombardment by the Assad regime and Russian forces.
Local activists said that the lives of about 400 civilians who are trapped in the ISIS -held districts of Yarmouk refugee camp, Al-Tadamun, Al-Zain, and Al-Hajar Al-Aswad in southern Damascus are at serious risk amidst a deteriorating humanitarian situation due to the suffocating siege.
In a joint statement released on Saturday, local activists said that life has become almost impossible in all the besieged neighborhoods of southern Damascus, adding that all appeals for the evacuation of those who are trapped inside have so far fallen on deaf ears.
Activists said that bodies of people killed in the bombardment were still lying in the streets as residents hiding in underground shelters could not get out to collect them.
Regime forces detained civilians who were trying to flee to adjacent areas that are under the control of the Assad regime, the statement added. It noted that people who are trapped in southern Damascus were mostly elderly and sick amid consistent power outages in those neighborhoods.
A UN official has accused the Assad regime of not allowing the delivery of aid to the civilians in the Yarmouk camp for Palestinian refugees and in eastern Ghouta in the Damascus suburbs.
“We are asking for access, now, to Yarmouk, we are asking for a convoy to Yarmouk, but we’re prevented from going there, it was actually the place that we were even not approved on our list. We often get a ‘yes’ on the list to go to places and then we are prevented in reality,” Jan Egeland, special adviser to the UN special envoy for Syria told a news conference at the UN headquarters in Geneva on Thursday.
Egeland also said that the UN agencies are facing difficulties delivering humanitarian aid to more than 40,000 people who live in congested displacement camps in eastern Ghouta.
Assad regime forces also detained 60 civilians, mostly women, children and the elderly while they were trying to flee the ISIS-held parts of the Yarmouk refugee camp towards the regime-controlled towns of Babila, Yilda and Beit Sahim. (Source: Syrian Coalition’s Media Department)
