Regime continues attacks on ‘starving suburb’ of Moadamiyet

INSIDE MOADIMYET: A mother in the Damascus suburb of Moadamiyet is on her way to donate her children’s clothes to others in need on Tuesday. Meanwhile, government troops launched repeated attempts to raid the district from the northwest, Qusai Zakarya, a spokesman for the Moadamiyet Media Center, told Syria Direct on Wednesday.

The unnamed woman is one of many residents of this East Ghouta town who remain trapped due to a regime blockade in place for more than 300 days.An estimated 8,500 civilians “are now suffering from cold and hunger” in the Damascus suburb, Zakariya said.

“The checkpoints stand between us,” the woman says in the video clip, describing how she cannot leave the town, which was targeted by chemical weapons on August 21^st.

“UN humanitarian aid cannot reach civilians in besieged areas,” the International Crisis Groupsaid in a statement earlier this week. “This is true even only a few miles from the international organizations’ offices in Damascus, where the regime deliberately and systematically starves people in a new tactic of modern war.”

Last week, the regime allowed the Syrian Red Crescent to oversee the evacuation of roughly 2,000 civilians from Moadamiyet following persistent reports of starvation and untreated illnesses and injuries due to the regime’s stranglehold around the rebel-controlled town. Opposition sources expressed concern about the fate of the evacuated civilians, most of whom are women and children, and some of whom had to be evacuated on stretchers after nearly a year living under siege.

Video courtesy of UgaritNews.