This is Eastern Ghouta, where hundreds are being killed and injured by Assad's forces Read more 
 
 Amnesty International said “flagrant war crimes” were being committed in eastern Ghouta on an “epic scale.” 
 
 
 
 Diana Semaan, the charity’s Syria researcher, said: “People have not only been suffering a cruel siege for the past six years, they are now trapped in a daily barrage of attacks that are deliberately killing and maiming them, and that constitute flagrant war crimes.” 
 
 Seven hospitals have also been bombed since Monday morning in eastern Ghouta, which was once the breadbasket of Damascus but has been under siege for years by the Assad government and subjected to devastating chemical attacks. The Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) control the northwestern region of Afrin, target of a month-old assault by the Turkish army and allied Syrian rebels. "The humanitarian situation of civilians in East Ghouta is spiraling out of control," said Panos Moumtzis, the U.N. regional humanitarian coordinator for the Syria crisis, in a statement late Monday. An estimated 700 civilians have been killed in the area in the last three months alone, not including those killed over the last week of escalation. The United Nations said last week Syria was seeing some of the worst fighting of the war, which is entering its eighth year. We’ve got nothing but God’s mercy and hiding out in our basements.” 
 
 - ALa’a Al Deen | Hammuriyeh town resident 
 
 
 
 As a barrage of air strikes, rocket fire and artillery slammed into several towns across Eastern Ghouta on Monday, the UN warned that the targeting of civilians in Eastern Ghouta “must stop now”. Photograph: Hamza Al-Ajweh/AFP/Getty Images 
 
 The Syrian civil defense, a search and rescue organisation, said 61 people were killed on Tuesday alone, while the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitor, said 194 people had died in the last 48 hours– a toll that encapsulated the unbridled violence of the war in Syria. Rebel groups responded with a wave of artillery bombardment targeting Damascus, killing 12 people and wounding 50 in government-controlled areas, according to the Observatory. “These families have nowhere left to run – they are boxed in and being pounded day and night.” 
 
 Elsewhere in Syria on Tuesday, pro-government fighters started entering the northern Kurdish enclave of Afrin, where Turkish troops have been on the offensive for a month. Syrian state media said on Monday that pro-regime forces were preparing to enter the area to “join the resistance against the Turkish aggression”.
– The name Eastern Ghouta may not be a familiar one, but the neighborhood near the Syrian capital of Damascus is now making international headlines for all the wrong reasons. The enclave of 22 communities happens to be the last opposition-controlled region near the capital, and it's been the target of fierce bombing by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. On Monday, airstrikes and artillery shelling killed about 100 people, including 20 children, reports the AP, citing stats from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the civil defense group known as the White Helmets. The details: Assad's strategy: With the civil war now in its seventh year, Assad is looking to reclaim rebel-held territory through "an outright military victory instead of a negotiated settlement," per the Guardian. The bombardment could be paving the way for a ground assault against the two Islamist factions that control the neighborhood of about 350,000 people, reports Gulf News. One problem: This is a suburb with no international borders and thus is of little strategic value to world powers, explains the Washington Post. "As a result, there is no power broker such as Turkey, Russia or the United States to deploy ground troops or strike a backroom deal."