Airstrikes from Syrian government forces hit the rebel-held town
of Douma on Sunday, killing as many as 82 people and wounding hundreds,
according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and aid groups.
Graphic video
purporting to show the immediate aftermath of the blast depicted massive plumes
of smoke, bodies strewn on the street, and people frantically running for their
lives.
At least 250 people were wounded in the attack, conducted by
President Bashar al-Assad's regime forces, activists say.
"In some
places there was not enough capabilities to transfer the victims. It was very
painful to see dead human bodies just left on the sidewalk," said Abdullah
al-Shami, a media activist, speaking to CNN via Skype. "Scores of injured
were bleeding while waiting their turn to get treatment."
Multiple
airstrikes hit a busy local vegetable market in Douma, about 15 kilometers (10
miles) northeast of Damascus, causing large-scale casualties, according to the
London-based monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, along with
the Qasioun News Agency, a local media network, and activists inside Douma.
"This
market was bombed recently. The ambulance system was on alert but today the
ambulances were not even enough to rescue all the people. The number of the
injured was over the capabilities of the field hospitals," said al-Shami.
The Syrian Revolution Network, an online network of
activists with more than a million followers, tweeted: "50 markets bombed
by Assad regime since the beginning of 2015. This one in #Douma bombed twice in
4 days."
CNN cannot
independently verify these accounts.
Syria's
state-run news agency SANA, which is pro-al-Assad, has yet to report the
incident.
Syria has been
locked in a civil war since 2011, after street protests erupted out of the Arab
Spring and morphed into a nationwide uprising against the regime. Douma, a
major city in the province of Rif Damashq -- meaning Damascus countryside,
which includes the suburbs that surround the capital city -- has been consumed
by bloodshed since the uprising.
The ongoing
violence has become a part of the daily life of many Syrians. Many have grown
numb to the warning sirens.
"There are
alert sirens but we hear them more than 20 times a day and now they have lost
their impact," said al-Shami.
Since the unrest, hundreds of thousands of refugees have fled
the country.
In July, the
United Nations reported that more than 4 million Syrians had fled the violence
in their homeland to seek refuge in neighboring countries.
Antonio
Guterres, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, has called the mass exodus
"the biggest refugee population from a single conflict in a
generation."
At least 7.6
million other people have been displaced inside Syria, according to the U.N.
refugee agency. That means more than half of all Syrians have been driven from
their homes by the war, which has killed well over 200,000 people.
No comments:
Post a Comment