{"id":2644,"date":"2018-02-20T05:10:21","date_gmt":"2018-02-20T13:10:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=2644"},"modified":"2018-02-20T05:10:21","modified_gmt":"2018-02-20T13:10:21","slug":"its-not-a-war-its-a-massacre-scores-killed-in-syrian-enclave-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=2644","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;&#8216;It&#8217;s not a war. It&#8217;s a massacre&#8217;: scores killed in Syrian enclave&#8221;, The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"content__headline-standfirst-wrapper\">\n<div class=\"tonal__standfirst u-cf\">\n<div class=\"content__standfirst\" data-link-name=\"standfirst\" data-component=\"standfirst\">\n<p>\u00a0Kareem Shaheen in Istanbul, London, 20 Feb 2018<\/p>\n<p>Assad regime uses barrel bombs and attacks hospitals in rebel-held eastern Ghouta.<\/p>\n<p>Pro-regime forces continued to bombard the opposition-controlled enclave of eastern Ghouta in <a class=\"u-underline\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/syria\" data-link-name=\"auto-linked-tag\" data-component=\"auto-linked-tag\">Syria<\/a> on Tuesday, leaving dozens dead, after more than 100 people were killed and hundreds wounded on a day of \u201chysterical\u201d violence on Monday.<\/p>\n<p>The surge in the killing came amid reports of an impending regime incursion into the area outside Damascus, which is home to 400,000 civilians. More than 700 people have been killed in three months, according to local counts, not including the deaths in the last week.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"element element-rich-link element--thumbnail element-rich-link--upgraded\" data-component=\"rich-link\" data-link-name=\"rich-link-1 | 1\">\n<div class=\"rich-link tone-media--item rich-link--gallery rich-link--pillar-news\"><\/div>\n<\/aside>\n<p>Five hospitals were also bombed on Monday in eastern Ghouta, which was once the breadbasket of Damascus but has been <a class=\"u-underline\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2018\/feb\/08\/syria-east-ghouta-third-day-bombing\" data-link-name=\"in body link\">under siege for years by the government<\/a> of Bashar al-Assad and subjected to devastating chemical attacks. Two hospitals suspended operations and one has been put out of service.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe are standing before the massacre of the 21st century,\u201d said a doctor in eastern Ghouta. \u201cIf the massacre of the 1990s was Srebrenica, and the massacres of the 1980s were Halabja and Sabra and Shatila, then eastern Ghouta is the massacre of this century right now.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He added: \u201cA little while ago a child came to me who was blue in the face and barely breathing, his mouth filled with sand. I emptied it with my hands. I don\u2019t think they had what we do in any of the medical textbooks. A wounded child breathing with lungs of sand. You get a child, a year old, that they saved from the rubble and is breathing sand, and you don\u2019t know who he is.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAll these humanitarian and rights organisations, all that is nonsense. So is terrorism. What is a greater terrorism than killing civilians with all sorts of weapons? Is this a war? It\u2019s not a war. It\u2019s called a massacre.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The death toll of at least 110 in a single day by local counts encapsulated the unbridled violence of the war in Syria. After seven years and interventions by regional and global powers, the humanitarian crisis has heightened instead of abating, as forces loyal to Assad\u2019s regime and his Russian and Iranian backers seek an outright military victory instead of a negotiated political settlement.<br \/>\nAid workers said the latest violence in eastern Ghouta, where 1,300 people died in 2013 after <a class=\"u-underline\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2013\/sep\/16\/syrian-chemical-attack-sarin-says-un\" data-link-name=\"in body link\">the Assad regime deployed sarin gas<\/a>, has included the use of notorious barrel bombs. The weapons are so inaccurate that their use is seen as a war crime by human rights watchdogs. The regime has also used fighter jets and artillery bombardment, on top of the punishing siege.<\/p>\n<div id=\"dfp-ad--inline1\" class=\"js-ad-slot ad-slot ad-slot--inline ad-slot--inline1 ad-slot--rendered\" data-link-name=\"ad slot inline1\" data-name=\"inline1\" data-mobile=\"1,1|2,2|300,250|fluid\" data-desktop=\"1,1|2,2|300,250|620,1|620,350|fluid\" data-google-query-id=\"CIrThITHtNkCFYyvZAodKQEHTg\"><\/div>\n<p>\u201cThe situation in eastern Ghouta is akin to the day of judgment,\u201d said Mounir Mustafa, the deputy director of the White Helmets, the volunteer group that rescues people from under the rubble of bombed buildings.<\/p>\n<p>The White Helmets said one of its volunteers, Firas Juma, died on Monday while responding to a bombing.<\/p>\n<p>In Geneva, the UN children\u2019s fund issued a blank \u201cstatement\u201d to express its outrage at the casualties among Syrian children, saying it had run out of words.<\/p>\n<p>Medical organisations said at least five clinics and hospitals, including a maternity centre, were bombed on Monday, some of them multiple times. An anaesthetist was killed in the attacks.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe bombing was hysterical,\u201d said Ahmed al-Dbis, a security official at the Union of Medical and Relief Organisations (UOSSM), which runs dozens of hospitals in areas controlled by the opposition in Syria. \u201cIt is a humanitarian catastrophe in every sense of the word. The mass killing of people who do not have the most basic tenets of life.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2018\/feb\/20\/its-not-a-war-its-a-massacre-scores-killed-in-syrian-enclave-eastern-ghouta\">The Guardian<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"content__meta-container js-content-meta js-football-meta u-cf\n\n    \"><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0Kareem Shaheen in Istanbul, London, 20 Feb 2018 Assad regime uses barrel bombs and attacks hospitals in rebel-held eastern Ghouta. Pro-regime forces continued to bombard the opposition-controlled enclave of eastern Ghouta in Syria on Tuesday, leaving dozens dead, after more than 100 people were killed and hundreds wounded on a day of \u201chysterical\u201d violence on [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2644"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2644"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2644\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2645,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2644\/revisions\/2645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}