Assad’s army has surrounded a village near Damascus that the regime gassed with chemical weapons last month, and it is not letting basic food supplies into the town, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
One of the newspaper’s reporters managed to overcome the government ban on foreign journalists and visited the village of Moadhamiya, home to 12,000 people but also where rebel fighters are located.
“We won’t allow them to be nourished in order to kill us,” said a 24-year-old loyalist fighter, referring to rebels and their supporters on the other side of town. “Let them starve for a bit, surrender and then be put on trial.”
The poison gas attack on Moadhamiya on August 26 killed approximately 80 people, according to activists.
The Journal’s reporter wrote that according to an activist, “Residents finished all grains and provisions that people traditionally store in their homes in Syria for winter. Electricity and most telephone lines have been cut off for months and the water retrieved from deep wells is scarce.”
“People are going to starve to death,” said a resident of a nearby town.