Concerns for New Massacres Rise in light of Poor Humanitarian Conditions
Merely a few hours have passed since the alleged truce was struck, and the Syrian regime is already breaching the truce in a number of areas in Syria. However, Homs saw the most of these breaches, as the already-heavy shelling has even escalated more after the alleged truce went into effect.
Deir B’alba, a neighborhood in Homs, saw a similar raid in last April. At the time, the raid left 243 dead in this month, including 199 who are families that were field-executed, where hundreds of people were mass-arrested and then executed. Most of the dead bodies were burned and disfigured, as heads were severed and corpses were distorted, before the dead bodies were buried in shallow mass graves.
This raid started on Eid’s fourth day, starting with a concentrated shelling in the west and south parts of the neighborhood, and from all the checkpoints in the vicinity of the neighborhood, while Syrian regime snipers got on top of the overlooking buildings and opened fire at the people who were trying to flee the neighborhood and the cars that were trying to escape with the most basic supplies.
The neighborhood has been suffering from a siege for months, and the medical state is severely poor. There is only one small makeshift hospital that is equipped with the most basic medical equipment, as most of the wounded from the shelling, even the ones who were wounded in their lower limbs by shrapnel from mortar shells, could bleed to death due to the lack of the necessary medical resources for their treatment.
25 people have been wounded in two days. Most of those are in critical conditions with no medications or doctors, while there is no possibility to get them out of the besieged neighborhood. Additionally, 11 martyrs were recorded by name – over half of them died due to the inability to treat them.