Regime Shelling Kills 12 People in Douma
AFP reports that 12 people were killed, including a child, in regime shelling Wednesday in the rebel-held town of Douma in the suburbs of Damascus.
“Several dozens more, including children, were wounded,” said the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition-backed monitoring group that relies on a network of activists, doctors and lawyers for its reports.
“Douma is a rebel bastion northeast of Damascus, which has been under suffocating army siege for more than a year,” the wire says. An AFP photographer in Douma said that among other points, the shelling hit a busy market.
At an ill-equipped field hospital, “The wounded were being treated on the floor,” he said, some near pools of blood.
Barrel Bomb Use in Syria Said to Escalate Despite U.N. Ban
The Los Angeles Times reports that the Syrian government has escalated its use of barrel bombs near Aleppo, defying a U.N. Security Council resolution banning the explosives.
A Human Rights Watch report released on Wednesday appealed to Russia and China, two of the Syrian regime’s main allies, “to cease blocking U.N. efforts to impose an arms embargo on the government … and to prohibit foreign servicing of the Damascus regime’s weaponry and warplanes.”
The paper writes that forces loyal to the regime “are thought to have dropped two barrel bombs on the al-Fardous area of Aleppo on Sunday evening, killing 15 people. In the five months since the Security Council ordered all parties in the three-year-old Syrian civil war to stop using barrel bombs and other weapons designed to cause widespread human casualties, at least 650 new damage sites have been documented near embattled Aleppo that are consistent with barrel bomb explosions.”
U.N. Reconsiders Aid Deliveries to Syria from Iraq
AFP reports that the United Nations’ top official says the organization is “pressing on with cross-border aid convoys to Syria from Turkey and Jordan, but is reviewing plans to send relief from Iraq.”
Earlier this month, its Security Council decided to begin cross-border aid deliveries without the Assad government’s consent. The aid will go from four crossing points to some of Syria’s hardest-hit areas.
The wire quotes U.N. humanitarian relief coordinator Valerie Amos as saying more relief trucks should be crossing into Syria “in the next few days.” The first convoy, with nine trucks, delivered food, shelter, water and sanitation supplies on July 24 from the Turkish border. “Given the volatile situation near the Iraqi border, we will review when we can start using the al-Yarubiyah crossing point,” Amos said.
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