BEIRUT (AP) — The Latest on developments related to Syria (all times local):

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is condemning the bombing of rebel-held eastern Ghouta and also calling the situation in the northern Syrian district of Afrin unacceptable.

Merkel said in a speech to the German parliament Wednesday that it's important to address the reasons why people flee their countries and pointed to the situation in Syria.

She said that "for all of Turkey's justified security interests, what is going on in Afrin is unacceptable, with thousands of civilians being persecuted, dying or having to flee."

The U.N. children's agency said Tuesday some 100,000 people were trapped in rural areas of Afrin and in need of humanitarian aid after Turkish and allied Syrian forces drove out a Syrian Kurdish militia there

Syrian rescuers and a war monitor say an airstrike in the rebel-held province of Idlib in northwestern Syria has killed at least 13 people, most of them children.

The Syrian Civil Defense in Idlib says the airstrike hit children running from their school in Kfar Bateekh village because of the jets flying overhead, killing 11 of them. The rescuers said Russian jets were behind the attack.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the airstrike killed at least eight children, adding that the number of those killed is likely to rise as rescuers are still looking for survivors under the rubble. The Observatory said it was not immediately clear who was behind the strikes.

Idlib is the largest area still controlled by insurgents in Syria.

Syria state media say the death toll from a rebel mortar assault on a market in Damascus has risen to 38, making it one of the deadliest attacks in the capital since the start of the seven-year civil war.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights on Wednesday put the death toll from the attack in Kashkol neighborhood even higher, at 43, including 11 pro-government fighters.

The government blamed the attack on rebels in the eastern suburbs, where Syrian troops backed by Russian warplanes have been waging a major offensive over the past month.

Videos of the aftermath of the attack posted online showed scenes of chaos, with people screaming and bodies and mannequins strewn across the ground.

Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.</s>Syrian government forces gained more ground in an assault on eastern Ghouta near Damascus on Saturday, a day after aid workers were purportedly hit by airstrikes. Rough Cut (no reporter narration).</s>Rockets fired by rebels from anti-gov’t controlled areas in Eastern Ghouta on a market in Kashkol neighborhood of Damascus held by the Syrian army killed over 35 civilians people and wounded at least 25.

At the same time, as government forces keep on conducting a large-scale offensive in Eastern Ghouta, Islamic State terrorists seize areas on the southern edge of the region.

Now ISIS is in control of Qadam neighborhood. Reports say about 25 pro-gov’t fighters were killed in fighting against terrorists there.</s>An aid worker in the besieged Syrian region of eastern Ghouta has spoken of the anguish and hopelessness felt by many trapped by airstrikes and unable to escape, saying it is a “wholesale slaughter witnessed by a motionless world.”

Ghouta, a region bordering the capital, Damascus, has been targeted by government forces since 2013 as part of the Syrian civil war in an effort to flush out rebel and opposition forces garrisoned in the area. The government launched an operation to retake rebel-held areas of Ghouta in February, ramping up a bombing campaign and blocking medical help and food from entering the region.

Amnesty International claims more than 500 civilians have been killed in recent months in a “catastrophic humanitarian situation,” while thousands more have been injured. The Syrian Network for Human Rights, based in Britain, claimed in a February report that nearly 13,000 people had been killed in the region since 2011. Hospitals, schools and places of worship are among the buildings that have been damaged by bombings.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said last month that the 400,000 people trapped in eastern Ghouta were living “in hell on earth,” as the U.N. unanimously voted in support of a 30-day ceasefire in Syria and the lifting of the siege on Ghouta. However, calls for a cease-fire have been ignored ― indeed, reports claimed more than 100 were killed in the week following the resolution.

Abdelkarim Ibrahim, an aid worker partnered with Save the Children, is working in eastern Ghouta to distribute winter kits to civilians. Through a translator, he told HuffPost of the “hysterical panic” experienced by people trapped in the region in the face of “constant airstrikes, barrel bombs and artillery bombardment.”

“The civilians of eastern Ghouta have never witnessed such a battering campaign where ... more than 4,200 airstrikes over the city of eastern Ghouta were launched. A city with a total area of 107 square kilometers [about 41 square miles] and 400,000 inhabitants has been battered by more than 4,200 airstrikes.”

Ibrahim says the cease-fire conditions have effectively been trimmed back to just a two-hour window each day before military action resumes. He said this was not enough time for aid workers to enter and bring medical help or food. Civilians are sheltering from bombs in inadequate, overcrowded and unsanitary basements.

“The internal refugees lack the minimal essentials of human life ― food, medicine and clothes. Currently, all the people of Ghouta live in basements unequipped with the basics needed for living,” he said.

“The basements are prisons for the masses ... . Such abject lack of cleanliness and health care facilities, such as water and personal hygiene equipment, have led to the spread of epidemics and other related issues, such as lice among children. The shortage of medicine for people with chronic diseases, such as diabetes and high blood pressure, has led to deaths. People with kidney disease are unable to have lifesaving dialysis sessions in Ghouta.

“There is difficulty in burying dead bodies. The city’s graveyards are among the targeted areas by the bombardment, which makes it impossible for people to bury the bodies of the dead. In Douma people had to bury the dead in public parks and in the backyards of houses because it was not possible for them to make it to the city’s graveyard.”

Ibrahim claimed people around the world had ignored the situation in Syria, saying the aid being pledged to, and reaching, eastern Ghouta was “an embarrassment to the world.” He claimed assistance reaching those in Ghouta was enough for only 6 percent of the city’s population.

“There is a growing inability of local aid agencies to provide aid to civilians. Food and medicine stores have been bombarded, and the work locations of humanitarian organisations have been targeted by attacking forces,” he said, adding that food stores and medical facilities had been damaged.

“It is an option for people in other countries of the world to pressure their governments and the human rights organizations into taking a collaborative stand against the mass killing of civilians in Eastern Ghouta. Their success would save hundreds of thousands of people from the wholesale slaughter witnessed by a motionless world.

“They are just like any other people around the world. This is what people outside Ghouta should realize so that they can firmly use their efforts to save them and protect them against injustice and killing.”</s>Thirty-five people were killed Tuesday in a rebel rocket barrage on the Damascus suburb of Yaramana, Syrian official news agency SANA said, citing the director of the capital's main hospital.

Police sources, however, told SANA that 29 people were killed and 23 others wounded.

The rockets were launched by "terrorist organizations" in eastern Ghouta, an opposition-controlled area outside Damascus, SANA said.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) put the number of fatalities at 34, including 21 civilians, and suggested that the death toll could rise given the gravity of the injuries inflicted.

Rebel rocket attacks have claimed 178 lives in greater Damascus over the last four months.

The Syrian army is currently engaged in a major offensive against rebel forces in eastern Ghouta, where nearly 1,500 have died since February 18, according to figures from the SOHR.</s>President Bashar al-Assad flaunted government advances in Syria's seven-year war by filming himself driving to meet frontline soldiers near Damascus, making a video of the journey from the city centre into areas recently recaptured.

"The road is open ... everything is running now in the city and in Syria," he said in the video, describing a road that had previously been cut by sniper fire and saying it was now easier to travel around the country.

The video, released overnight after a trip on Sunday, showed Assad in sunglasses at the wheel of his Honda car, speaking about the government's increasing strength as peaceful scenery behind him gave way to battle-scarred concrete.

His visit to the battle front in eastern Ghouta, where state television showed him cheered by soldiers as smoke rose in the distance, came after tens of thousands of civilians began fleeing the opposition area for government lines.
• U.S. pushes UN to demand truce in Syria's eastern Ghouta, Damascus

The army offensive began a month ago with a massive bombardment and has so far retaken most of the area, the biggest rebel enclave near Damascus, cutting it into three zones.

It is the latest in a series of military gains for Assad after Russia entered the war on his side in 2015, ending rebel hopes of toppling him by force. Large areas remain outside his grip, but he now controls the main cities of Syria's heavily populated west.

"This is the picture he wants to give ... he is in control and finishing off the opposition in eastern Ghouta," said Nikolaos Van Dam, a former diplomat in Syria and author of two books on the country. While Assad has increasingly been shown travelling around Syria in recent years, it is unusual for him to visit areas close to the battlefront, as he did on Sunday, meeting cheering soldiers as well as civilians who had escaped the fighting.

There have been numerous other signs of his increasing confidence, including the release last year of a banknote bearing his image for the first time since he became president in 2000.

Wearing a suit without a tie and speaking informally to the in-car camera, Assad gave a running commentary on the areas he was driving through and discussed the military campaign. He drove into eastern Ghouta from the east — the direction from which the army campaign began a month ago — into the district of Jisreen, which was captured late on Friday.

"When we see that people are returning to the state, it affirms what we are saying: that people want the state, and the state is the mother and father of everybody," he said as he passed civilians who had left the rebel enclave.
• 'We lost everything': After 7 years of war, Syrian refugee families can only dream of returning home

His government and its ally Russia describe the opposition as terrorists and the population in rebel-held areas as human shields for armed groups.

The opposition says residents of eastern Ghouta — an early centre of the uprising against Assad — do not want to return to his rule for fear of persecution, which he denies would happen.

Speaking to the camera as his car passed from fields into a town pocked with shell holes, Assad said Syria's long-term challenge would be to "rehabilitate" children brought up under rebel rule.

"This generation has lived five years with dark thoughts, and with elements that resemble the days of the Middle Ages," he said, saying they needed to be brought back "onto the right path."

He said their lost education was the price of the war.

"It can't be avoided one way or another," he said.

Meanwhile, Turkish forces will withdraw from the Syrian border region of Afrin, leaving it to its "real owners," once it has been cleared of "terrorists," Turkey said on Monday.

Turkey and its Syrian rebel allies swept into the regional capital, also called Afrin, on Sunday, raising their flags in the town centre and declaring full control after an eight-week campaign against the Kurdish YPG militia.

"We are not permanent there [in Afrin] and we are certainly not invaders. Our goal is to hand the region back to its real owners after clearing it of terrorists," Bekir Bozdag, a deputy prime minister, told reporters.
• Turkey says its forces now control Syrian town of Afrin
• Turkey's Afrin offensive in Syria has displaced 150,000, Kurdish official says

The fight for Afrin, a once-stable pocket of northwest Syria, has opened a new front in the country's multi-sided civil war and highlighted the ever-greater role of foreign powers such as Turkey.

It is Turkey's second cross-border operation into Syria during that country's seven-year civil war. The first operation, dubbed "Euphrates Shield," targeted what Ankara called a "terror corridor" made up of ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) and Kurdish fighters further east from Afrin along its southern frontier with Syria.

Turkey's campaign in Afrin has drawn criticism in the West, including the United States and France, which have provided arms and training to the YPG and fear that the incursion could weaken international action against Islamic State fighters in Syria.

Ankara views the YPG as an extension of the militant PKK group that has waged an insurgency in southeast Turkey for decades.

Turkey has been infuriated by the Western support given to the Syrian Kurdish fighters.

Bozdag said Turkey had collected "most" of the weapons given to Kurdish fighters by the United States, after the YPG left the arms behind as they fled the town.

More than 200,000 people who fled a Turkey-led offensive on the Kurdish town of Afrin are without shelter or access to food and water in nearby areas, a Syrian Kurdish official from Afrin told Reuters on Monday.

"The people with cars are sleeping in the cars, the people without are sleeping under the trees with their children," Hevi Mustafa, a top member of the Kurdish civil authority in the Afrin area, told Reuters by phone.

Mustafa said civilians still in Afrin town were facing threats from the Turkey-backed groups.</s>Dozens of people have been killed in the latest round of Syrian government airstrikes in Eastern Ghouta.</s>Washington (AFP) - The United States said Tuesday it was "deeply concerned" about the escalating Syrian and Russian attacks on the rebel-held enclave of Eastern Ghouta, which have left more than 250 civilians dead in two days.

State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert blamed the Assad regime's "siege and starve tactics" for adding to the humanitarian disaster in the Damascus district, and endorsed the United Nations' call for a monthlong halt to violence.

"The United States is deeply concerned by the escalating violence in the Damascus suburb of Eastern Ghouta," Nauert told reporters. "The escalation is exacerbating the already grave human suffering of nearly 400,000 people.

"The cessation of violence must begin now, and those needing emergency assistance should be allowed to evacuate immediately," she added.

Eastern Ghouta is home to more than 400,000 people living under crippling government siege, with little access to food or medical resources.

Syrian and Russian air strikes slammed the area earlier, adding 100 civilian deaths to the toll since Sunday and putting another hospital out of service.

The rebel-held district is nominally included in a "de-escalation" deal meant to tamp down violence, but President Bashar al-Assad is apparently preparing troops for an imminent ground assault to retake the area.

Nauert compared the assault on Eastern Ghouta to the 2016 siege of East Aleppo, when the Assad regime with Russian support laid waste to a heavily civilian populated district of the city in its push to eliminate Islamic State fighters.

"The horrors of East Aleppo are being repeated in East Ghouta with the ongoing slaughter of trapped civilians and woefully inadequate access for humanitarian actors," she said.

"We call on all parties to commit to the unconditional deescalation of violence. Russia must end its support of the Assad regime and its allies. They are responsible for the attacks, for the dire humanitarian situation in East Ghouta and for the horrendous civilian death toll."</s>A Syrian boy receives treatment as victims of reported regime air strikes on Hamouria, Saqba and Kafr Batna are brought to a make-shift hospital in the rebel-held enclave of Eastern Ghouta on March 7, 2018. Photo by AFP/Amer Almohibany

Syrian forces pursued a relentless air and ground offensive against Eastern Ghouta on Thursday, moving closer to retaking the rebel enclave but also depriving desperate civilians of vital aid.

More than 930 civilians have been killed in the nearly three-week assault on the last rebel enclave outside the capital, where dozens suffered overnight from a suspected chlorine attack.

On another front in Syria's complex seven-year war, pro-Turkey rebels seized control of the key northern town of Jandairis from Kurdish fighters.

Russia-backed government forces have retaken more than half of Eastern Ghouta, a monitor says, since launching their devastating offensive on the enclave on February 18.

The fighting has prompted international outrage, culminating in the UN Security Council demanding an immediate ceasefire, aid deliveries and evacuations.

On Thursday, 24 civilians were killed in air strikes and rocket fire on Eastern Ghouta, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said.

An aid delivery planned for Thursday was meant to bring relief to war-weary civilians inside Eastern Ghouta, which is home to 400,000 inhabitants who have been living under government siege since 2013.

But with bombardment continuing, the joint convoy between the United Nations, International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Syrian Arab Red Crescent could not go through.

"The movement of the convoy was not authorized by the Syrian authorities due to security reasons," said Jens Laerke, a spokesman for the UN's humanitarian coordination office (OCHA).

It marks the second time this week aid operations have been disrupted by military developments, with food deliveries cut short Monday due to bombardment.

Eastern Ghouta towns and villages have fallen in quick succession in recent days, with regime forces on the verge of cutting the remaining rebel-held territory into two isolated pockets.

A military official said the regime would open up a new "humanitarian corridor" for civilians wishing to flee from the south of the enclave.

But Moscow accused the rebels of having attacked two Syrian army checkpoints, causing casualties and further holding up aid deliveries. They were "doing everything possible to prevent residents from leaving", it said in a statement.

In the town of Hammuriyeh, AFP's correspondent saw motionless bodies lying in the streets on Thursday after a night of ferocious bombing.

Dozens of civilians were treated in the town for breathing difficulties late Wednesday, with medics reporting symptoms consistent with a toxic attack.

Doctors at one facility treated at least 29 patients with signs of exposure to chlorine, according to the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), which supports hospitals in Eastern Ghouta.

It said victims were suffering from shortness of breath, wheezing, and redness of the eyes.

Several families were seen trying to reach fresh air late Wednesday on the roof of a four-storey building in Hammuriyeh, after air strikes on their neighborhood.

"I'm going to suffocate," two children screamed as rescue workers carried them down from the roof.

Regime forces have been repeatedly accused of using chlorine on Eastern Ghouta in recent weeks, which both the government and Russia have staunchly denied.

Syria's war has killed more than 340,000 people and displaced millions since starting in 2011 with the brutal repression of anti-government protests.

It has since spiralled into a complex conflict involving world powers.

Since January 20, Turkey-led rebels have pressed an assault on the Kurdish enclave of Afrin in the north of the country.

On Thursday, Turkish forces and allied Syrian rebels seized the town of Jandairis, the Observatory said.

"Turkish forces and allied Syrian rebels took full control of Jandairis... after heavy and sustained bombardment by the Turkish aviation," it said.

A rebel commander from the Turkey-backed Faylaq al-Sham group told an AFP reporter in Jandairis the town was under full control.

"The entire city of Jandairis was liberated from the secessionist gangs," said the commander, who goes by the name Abu Saleh.

"The fight will continue until the whole of Afrin is cleared of them."

Turkey says the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) who control the enclave are a "terrorist" group.

But the Kurdish militia have also formed the backbone of a US-backed alliance that has successfully fought the Islamic State jihadist group in Syria.

The UN Security Council on February 24 demanded a 30-day cessation of hostilities across the country, but the resolution has done little to bring relief to civilians.

The UN's top body met behind closed doors on Wednesday in an attempt to shore up the ceasefire.

UN peace envoy Staffan de Mistura briefed the meeting and offered to help broker a deal with Russia to allow fighters in Eastern Ghouta to leave, a diplomat said.

Rebel groups operating in Eastern Ghouta have so far refused to discuss evacuating the enclave and have been firing rockets and artillery into eastern areas of Damascus in recent weeks, leaving at least 32 dead the Observatory says.</s>Pro-government forces bombarded Syria's eastern Ghouta on Tuesday, killing at least 49 people, after the heaviest one-day death toll there in three years on Monday, a war monitoring group said. Emily Wither reports.
A rocket fired from rebel-held Eastern Ghouta strikes a popular market in Damascus, killing at least 35 people, according to Syrian state TV SANA.