Syrian regime targets Damascus suburb, killing 5

EASTERN GHOUTA/ANKARA

The Syrian regime on Tuesday shelled the besieged Eastern Ghouta district, a suburb of Damascus, killing five civilians, according to civil-defense teams known as the White Helmets.

Abu Yamin, a press officer for Eastern Ghouta’s White Helmets, told Anadolu Agency that Assad regime forces had targeted Eastern Ghouta’s town of Sakba with two separate artillery barrages.

"A total of five civilians, including two women and two children, were killed in the attacks,” Abu Yamin, using a pseudonym to protect his identity, said.

“Civil-defense teams are now at the scene, pulling the injured from the wreckage and taking them to healthcare facilities," he added.

The spokesman went on to point out that the nearby town of Kafr Batna had also been targeted but that no casualties had been reported.

Roughly 400,000 civilian residents of Eastern Ghouta now face the specter of starvation as a direct result of the regime blockade, which has led to severe shortages of both food and medicine.

Eastern Ghouta falls within a network of de-escalation zones set up in Syria by Turkey, Russia and Iran.

War-torn Syria has only just begun to emerge from a devastating civil war that began in early 2011, when the Assad regime cracked down on pro-democracy protests with unexpected ferocity.

Since then, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in the fighting and more than 10 million displaced, according to claims by the UN.