Aid convoy enters Douma: Ghouta under attack

DOUMA, Syria: An international aid convoy entered Syria’s Eastern Ghouta on Monday to deliver much-needed supplies as regime forces seized more ground in a fierce offensive to retake the battered rebel enclave.

The United Nations said 46 trucks had entered Eastern Ghouta and arrived in the main town of Douma, in the first aid delivery since the start of the regime assault last month. The aid arrived after fresh air strikes hit besieged Eastern Ghouta and regime troops were reported to have retaken a third of the enclave in a rapidly advancing offensive.

An AFP reporter in Douma said warplanes were flying overhead and explosions from further bombardment on the enclave could be heard even as the aid was being unloaded. Western powers have piled pressure on Damascus and its Russian ally to end the offensive on Eastern Ghouta -- one of the bloodiest assaults of Syria’s nearly seven-year civil war -- but President Bashar al-Assad warned there would be no let up.

More than two weeks of air strikes, artillery and rocket fire on the last major rebel-held enclave near Damascus have left more than 700 civilians dead and three quarters of housing damaged in the area.

More bombs, including crude improvised munitions known as "barrel bombs", were dropped in overnight raids on Monday, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group.

At least 10 people were killed in the town of Hammuriyeh, said the Britain-based Observatory, which relies on a network of sources inside Syria. Another 19 died in Jisreen and other towns, the monitor said, bringing to 724 the number of civilians killed since the assault began, including at least 170 children.

The UN Human Rights Council on Monday ordered investigators to probe the latest violence, after the world body’s rights chief warned crimes against humanity had likely been committed and that its perpetrators would not "get away with this".

The resolution, tabled by Britain, specifically condemned "the indiscriminate use of heavy weapons and aerial bombardments against civilians, and the alleged use of chemical weapons in Eastern Ghouta".

Regime troops and allied forces pushed into the enclave from the east in recent days and by early Monday had retaken a third of Eastern Ghouta, according to the Observatory. "Regime forces are advancing at a high pace because operations so far are mostly conducted in farmland," Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said, adding that they had advanced to two kilometres southeast of Douma.

The armed groups there, one of which is made up of fighters from al-Qaeda’s ex-affiliate, have been lobbing mortar rounds and firing rockets on adjacent neighbourhoods of Damascus, killing around 20 civilians in two weeks.

The latest ground offensive sent hundreds of civilians fleeing from their homes to other areas farther from the moving front line, compounding a humanitarian crisis which has drawn comparisons with the devastating 2016 battle of Aleppo. Over the years, Eastern Ghouta’s estimated 400,000 inhabitants have depended for their survival on smuggling, local farms and rare aid deliveries as they have been trapped in a government siege.

Monday’s convoy was delivering "health and nutrition supplies, along with food for 27,500 people in need," the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs (OCHA) in Syria said.