BEIRUT, Lebanon — The Syrian government continued an intensifying campaign of airstrikes against rebels in the suburbs of Damascus, the capital, on Monday, with sharply contrasting accounts of the effects: the government reported progress against “armed terrorists,” while anti-government activists said that 15 children were among more than 30 people killed in the past two days.
A boy’s naked body, thickly coated in gray dust, lay prone amid rubble in a video that activists said was shot on Monday in Moadamiyeh, a suburb southwest of Damascus, on a street echoing with high-pitched wails and crammed with cinder blocks from collapsed facades. Upstairs, in a room that no longer had walls, a woman could briefly be seen carrying the motionless body of a child.
A second video showed the bodies of half a dozen children laid out on blood-soaked blankets, including one curly-headed toddler of no more than two. "Let the whole world observe, those are the victims," a narrator said on the video. "Those are the ones Bashar al-Assad is fighting,” he added, referring to the Syrian president. The origins of the video could not be independently verified.
The government’s SANA news service, however, said that airstrikes had killed scores of “armed terrorists” in the Damascus suburbs, including eight men it identified by name.
The government has mounted days of intense attacks to push rebels out of Daraya and neighboring Moadamiyeh, trying to increase the buffer zone around the nearby presidential palace and the neighborhood of Kafr Souseh, where some key security offices are.
The continued carnage is taking place against a backdrop of Syrian and international concern that the conflict could stretch out for months without a political settlement — and as Russia’s foreign minister urged the Syrian opposition to make a more serious effort to reach one by offering concrete proposals to the government.
Neither Mr. Assad nor his opponents have offered proposals that have any hope of being accepted by the other side. Mr. Assad refuses to talk to his armed opponents and the opposition insists that Mr. Assad’s exit is a precondition for talks.
The airstrike in Moadamiyeh on Monday killed at least 13 people, including five women and eight children, and rescuers were trying to recover more people from beneath rubble, according to the antigovernment Syrian Observatory for Human rights. The nearly two-year uprising has killed more than 60,000 people, according to United Nations estimates. It began as a peaceful movement for democratic reforms and became a civil war after the government fired on unarmed protesters.
International groups have been increasingly sounding the alarm that the world is not responding sufficiently to Syria’s humanitarian crisis.
International humanitarian efforts need to be increased quickly to handle the unrelenting exodus of refugees from Syria, which has reached more than 600,000, as well as more than 2 million people displaced inside the country, the New York-based International Rescue Committee said in a report released Monday.
The committee urged nations to meet the United Nation’s call for $1.5 billion to help refugees. About 70 percent of Syrian refugees are living not in camps but dispersed in cities and towns, the report said, arguing that these “urban refugees” are “grossly underserved” because they are hard to locate and track. Desperate families end up in crushing debt, without money for food, rent or medical care, leading women to join the sex trade and parents to sell daughters for early marriage or place children in exploitative jobs, the report said.
The report also emphasized a little-discussed issue, the threat of rape, which many families interviewed in Jordan and Lebanon cited as a primary reason for their flight.
“Many women and girls relayed accounts of being attacked in public or in their homes, primarily by armed men,” the report said. “These rapes, sometimes by multiple perpetrators, often occur in front of family members.”
The report said that rape and sexual assault have been underreported because of social stigma that can be directed at victims and their families.
Syria Launches Deadly Airstrikes in Damascus Suburbs
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Syria Launches Deadly Airstrikes in Damascus Suburbs
