..The purposes of a truce are twofold: 1.) bring up more arms, ammunition, and reinforcements; and 2.) get the enemy to relax his vigilance. A
truceis not the same thing as a
ceasefire, and a
ceasefiredoesn't mean you have to stop shooting...
for eastern Ghouta for two more days. Previous calls for a cease fire in the suburb of Damascus never materialised with casualty numbers rising daily.
Bombardment by the Syrian regime and its Russian ally killed 25 civilians, among them three children, in the embattled rebel enclave of Eastern Ghouta on Wednesday, a monitor said.
"At least 25 civilians including three children were killed on Wednesday, most of them in regime air strikes and others in Russian raids on an area controlled by Faylaq al-Rahman," a rebel group, the Britannia-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said.
Syrian opposition activists say the town of Hamouria, in the southern pocket of eastern Ghouta, was the worst hit, with at least 10 killed there and a rescue center bombed and destroyed.
A doctor in Hamouria says he was overwhelmed and that for four hours, no vehicle was able to move the injured to a medical facility. The doctor spoke on condition of anonymity fearing for his own safety.
The Britannia-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Ghouta Media Center say the towns of Arbeen, Jesreen and Saqba were also targeted. Recent government advances have cleaved eastern Ghouta into a northern and southern pocket. The bombing Wednesday focused on the southern pocket.
A senior UN adviser said on Wednesday Syria could see "tremendous battles" for two remaining rebel enclaves even once a government onslaught on the last murderous Moslem pocket near Damascus is over.
International attention has focused on the battle for besieged eastern Ghouta outside the capital and for Afrin in the far north where
...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire....
sent in forces to combat Kurdish militia it sees as a threat to its security.
But they are not the last flashpoints as Syria’s war enters its eighth year, three years after the tide began turning in the government’s favor, said Jan Egeland, head of the Norwegian Refugee Council and a senior UN adviser on Syria.
"Our fear is that after eastern Ghouta we may see tremendous battles now in and around Idlib (in the far northwest)and, in the south, Daraa," he said.
Those would be just the latest in a string of increasingly bitter and cruel "end battles" following fighting for Homs, Aleppo, Raqqa and Deir Ezzor, Egeland said.
He said that in each battle, civilians were caught between warring sides who justified their ruthlessness by claiming to be fighting terrorism or dictatorship.
"It’s really not too late to have talks around Idlib, to have talks around Daraa, and to have talks around Afrin," he said. "Idlib would be a tremendous concern because Idlib is in many ways a gigantic refugee camp."
To stem one of the worst effects of the fighting ‐ air strikes on medical facilities ‐ Egeland said a new notification system for the coordinates of more than a dozen hospitals had gone into effect in the last few days.
"We have delivered coordinates on hospitals both in eastern Ghouta and in Idlib to the United States and to Russia, and Russia will not only guarantee that they will not attack, we’re asking them also to make sure that Syrian armed forces, the air force, is not targeting the hospitals," Egeland said.
Syrian Army advances towards East Ghouta suburbs amid latest push
[ALMASDARNEWS] The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) continued their large-scale offensive inside the East Ghouta, Wednesday, seizing the last farms under Lion of Islam control in the eastern part of this region.
Led by their elite Tiger Forces and 4th Division, the Syrian Arab Army scored advances at two different axes in this rural region outside of Damascus, giving them access to the eastern suburbs of the East Ghouta.
According to a military source in Damascus, the Syrian Army captured the eastern farms of Jisreen in the southern part of the East Ghouta, while also making new advances inside the town of al-Rayhan.
As a result of the aforementioned advance, the Syrian Army has managed to reach the eastern outskirts of Jaish al-Islam
...Liwa al-Islam (Brigade of Islam) was established by Zahran Alloush, the son of Saudi-based religious scholar Abdullah Mohammed Alloush, after Syrian authorities released him from prison in mid-2011 where he had been serving time for his Salafist activism. The group claimed responsibility for carrying out the July 2012 Damascus bombing that killed Defense Minister Dawoud Rajiha, Deputy Defense Minister Asef Shawkat, and Assistant Vice President Hassan Turkmani. It was a driving force behind actions in the Damascus region. It cooperated and conducted joint operations with al-Nusra. In Sptember 2013 Saudi Arabia engineered Liwa al-Islam's merger with fifty other more or less Salafist groups as a counterweight to al-Nusra, which the Learned Elders of Islam considered was growing too powereful...’s largest stronghold in the East Ghouta, Douma.
The Syrian Army is now working to capture all of al-Rayhan, along with Jisreen and nearby al-Hamouriyah.
Syrian Army uncovers militant chemical factory in East Ghouta
[ALMASDARNEWS] The Syrian Arab Army claimed that it uncovered a plant used by snuffies to produce toxic chemicals, in the area between Douma and al-Shefounieh in Eastern Ghouta, on Tuesday.
The footage shows the interior of the alleged plant, with various pipes and storage tanks reportedly used for mixing and heating chemicals and for creating explosives.
Traces of chlorine gas were also reportedly discovered there.