Syria Live Coverage: The Fight Near Damascus

Marianne Gasser of the Red Cross on the situation with health care (see also 1150 GMT)

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1805 GMT: Casualties. The Local Coordination Committees report 102 people killed today, including 13 children and four women. Forty of the deaths are in Damascus and its suburbs and 28 in Aleppo Province.

1655 GMT: Regime Attacks. Opposition activists claim the Syrian military killed at least 26 people, half of them children, in a bombardment of insurgent-held Damascus suburbs on Sunday.

Video footage showed women weeping over the dismembered bodies of children strewn across a field in Eastern Ghouta, near an air defence base on the edge of the town of Muleiha, 5 kilometres (3 miles) east of Damascus.

Muleiha is the last major fortification east of Damascus held by the regime.

Activist Yasmine al-Shami said residential areas around Muleiha and in the working-class suburbs of Hazzeh, Kfar Batna, and Douma were being heavily hit.

A report by the opposition Damascus Media Centre said insurgents had attacked the Muleiha base with rocket-propelled grenades and mortars for five days, with the army firing more than 600 rockets on the town in response.

A commander in Liwa al-Islam, one of several insurgent brigades fighting in the area, said the compound was well defended: "Our objective is to take it, but it will not be immediate."

1450 GMT: The Regime Turns Against Brahimi. The regime's attacks on Lakhdar Brahimi, which began after the United Nations envoy said on Wednesday that President Assad should tnot be part of a transitional government, continue today.

"It is clear that Mr Brahimi is now out of the loop for the solution for Syria. He has taken sides, he is not a mediator," the pro-regime daily Al-Watan wrote on Sunday's front page. "Brahimi is incapable of finding a solution to the Syrian crisis."

The newspaper continued, "Brahimi's mission is useless, just like (his predecessor) Kofi Annan, who resigned when he realised that he had no role to play in a war waged against Syria by several Western capitals."

1410 GMT: Regime Attacks. The aftermath of regime shelling of the Eastern Ansary section of Aleppo, with damage and casualties:

1330 GMT: Refugees. Lebanese officials have appealed to Arab countries to fund an emergency plan for assistance to Syrian refugees in the country amid a “dangerous humanitarian situation".

“The situation has become worrisome and stressful on a large scale especially as the government’s plan was designed based on the presence of 200,000 refugees while the number, I think, has surpassed 200,000,” Minister of Social Affairs Abu Faour said. He asserted that Lebanon’s plan involves an annual $180 million budget to meet health, social and education services, including the current enrolment of 30,000 Syrian children in public schools.

Abu Faour said that the United Nations High Commission for Refugees expects the number of refugees in Lebanon to reach 425,000 by June.

1150 GMT: Health Care. Fabrice Weissman of Médecins Sans Frontières, which opened a hospital in Idlib Province in June, talks of the difficulties of providing health care:

As soon as you cross the border, you are vulnerable to aerial bombing by the Syrian air force, even behind battle lines. Hospitals are at particular risk, as they have become one of the government’s preferred targets. As a result, public hospitals are deserted.

Temporary field hospitals that do perform surgery tend to be hidden in individual houses and abandoned public facilities or are buried underground. When they are spotted, the doctors change location.

This makes it difficult to organise medical treatment. Some Syrian medical professionals have gone into exile and dentists and pharmacists are providing emergency medical care.

Their skills are improving but they are rarely trained in war surgery, which presents specific complications such as bone infections, and in triaging victims during mass influx of wounded.

Even so, they are managing quite well given the conditions and increasing stock-outs of medical supplies such as anaesthetics. Syrian doctors from the diasporas are coming to help out, too.

What struck me most profoundly about this conflict is the way health facilities have became part of the war zone. The Syrian army is waging a war against health workers and services operating in opposition controlled areas. Using health care denial as a weapon of oppression, the government has de facto transformed health care provision as a weapon of resistance.

1125 GMT: A Defection. Major General Mahmoud Ali, an official in the Ministry of Interior, announces his defection:

0735 GMT: The Fight Near Damascus. After this week's big news of the takeover of Taftanaz airbase by insurgents, the focus on Saturday moved to the regime's bombardment of opposition-held Damascus suburbs. A Syrian official put out an unconfirmed claim that the southern suburb of Darayya, attacked by President Assad's forces for weeks, had finally been re-taken, and airstrikes continued to the east of the capital.

The Free Syrian Army asserted that it downed a warplane at the Mezzeh military airport, attacked a checkpoint on the road to the Damascus International Airport, and fought the Syrian military near Eastern and Western Ghouta.

Of the 141 deaths claimed by the Local Coordination Committees on Saturday, 61 were in Damascus and its suburbs and 32 in Aleppo Province. Twelve people were killed in Raqqa Province, including five outside a bakery, and 12 in Hama Province.