The Syrian regime committed “slow-motion slaughter” of unknown numbers of Syrians trapped in besieged and hard-to-reach areas by willfully denying them food and health care, according to a new report Tuesday from a civil rights group.
Physicians for Human Rights said in the report that the regime consistently exploited a new UN aid delivery system, depriving millions of Syrians unable to leave their towns and cities of critically needed food and medicine. The group called that a war crime.
The New York-based advocacy group said a new two-step approval process for aid convoys that Syrian and UN officials agreed to in April 2016 “fell abysmally short” of its aim of ensuring access to all Syrians in need because the Syrian regime retained “unilateral authority” over who received assistance.
Besides the unknown numbers of Syrians that have starved to death, Physicians for Human Rights said many others suffered avoidable deaths because military forces stripped medical supplies from aid convoys that did manage to enter besieged and hard-to-reach areas.
“Still others bleed to death from war-related injuries — or die in childbirth, or from other preventable causes — because their besiegers refuse to allow the sick and injured to be evacuated to medical care,” the rights group said.
Meanwhile, the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria said the regime intentionally bombed the Ain Al-Fijeh spring in December, leaving more than 5 million people in Damascus without access to water.
The report, meanwhile, dismissed regime allegations that opposition fighters had contaminated the water.
Around 5.5 million people in Damascus and its suburbs were cut off from water when fighting intensified in Wadi Barada near Damascus in late December.
The commission also said it believed regime forces deliberately bombed a school complex in the country’s northern countryside, killing 21 children, last October.
The commission said the attack on the Haas village school complex in the opposition-held province of Idlib constituted a war crime. The attack was widely reported at the time.
Separately, the regime and key powerbrokers tried to shrug off the absence of opposition groups as they gathered for Astana talks on the six-year conflict, but the opposition’s refusal to attend appeared a body blow for any hopes of progress.
 Source: Arab News