Airstrikes By Syrian Regime Leave At Least 70 Dead, Activists Say

More than 550 people were said to be injured after at least 15 airstrikes struck a marketplace in Douma, near Damascus.

Airstrikes carried out by the Syrian regime at a marketplace near Damascus on Friday killed at least 70 people and injured 550, Doctors Without Borders said.

The blasts were first flagged by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based monitoring group, which counted at least 15 aerial strikes.

The director of a nearby hospital supported by Doctors Without Borders, which is also known as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), called the incident “an extremely violent bombing,” and added that several victims needed to have their limbs amputated.

“We did our best to cope, but the number of critically wounded was far beyond what we could handle with our limited means,” the director said, according to a statement from MSF, which did not name the medical worker.

The SOHR last listed a death toll of 57 including five children, and said the airstrikes were carried out by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.

MSF said 250 patients required surgery after the shelling, including for "severe, multiple-trauma wounds." A further 300 patients were said to have been treated for wounds that did not require surgery.

The rebel-held city of Douma, located about 12.4 miles from Damascus, was also the site of an attack on Thursday. That incident took place near a makeshift hospital and resulted in at least 15 deaths and 100 injuries, according to the MSF.

"As the closest makeshift hospital had been bombed the previous day, local medical workers struggled to cope with the influx of injured people," MSF said in its statement. "The devastation caused by the initial airstrike on the market was exacerbated by further shelling on the rescue teams who were attending to the wounded."

MSF's director of Syria operations for MSF, Brice De Le Vingne, described the bombings as war crimes.

“This massive bombing on a crowded market and the repeated destruction of the few available medical facilities, breaches everything that the rules of war stand for,” he said.

On Friday, President Obama announced that he would send fewer than 50 special operations troops to Syria.

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