Halting the Bloodshed

"The past month witnessed large massacres and the regime was conducting wide operations to try to crush the uprising.  Last month's acts of violence were unprecedented."

Omar Idilbi, Cairo - Local Coordination Committees

Activists reported last week that between 300 and 600 people were killed in Daraya outside of Damascus, during shelling and a killing spree conducted by regime troops storming the town.  The activist group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, headquartered out of Britain, that 5,440 people, 4,114 of whom were civilians, were killed in August alone in Syria's civil war.

The regime has been bombarding aeas where they know people line up to buy bread, at bakeries near and around Aleppo.  It was also in Aleppo that the regime is working hard to break rebel resistance.  In a spirit of entrepreuneurship, improvised bombs have been lobbed into the city.  They are barrels filled with TNT, oil and chunks of steel.  They explode, maim and kill across an area wider than that struck by high explosives.

"The sound was like nothing else I've ever heard.  It was an almighty whoosh.  I was lucky I was standing behind a corner, but I was still knocked off my feet.  When I came round my ears were bleeding."  Mohammed Ibrahim

The military is responding to the rebel advance in Aleppo, on its streets where taking and losing ground has been commonplace, by bombing from a distance.  Tanks sit on the ring roads firing shells on rebel lines.  And helicopter gunships rake the positions of the enemy, while jets drop bombs flattening whole housing blocks.

"The first incident was over a public park in the Bab al-Nairab area of the city where people had taken refuge from the shelling.  They were ordinary people who were defenceless against this type of attack."  Those barrel bombs, hitting in the narrow apartment-block streets would have killed everyone in the near vicinity.

"Bashar al-Assad has come to the end of his political life.  At the moment, Assad is acting in Syria not as a politician, but as an element, an actor, of war", said Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan in a Turkish television interview broadcast.  Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN's new envoy to Syria informed Assad's regime that change is "urgent" and "necessary", and that it must meet the "legitimate" demands of the Syrian people.

To others, Mr. Brahimi admits that his mission is an hopelessly impossible one.