Syria Live Coverage: The Fight Near Damascus
Sunday, January 13, 2013 at 13:38 | Scott Lucas in EA Live, EA Middle East and Turkey, Middle East and Iran 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."