Daesh has overrun the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus.
Reports of killings and even beheadings were beginning to circulate on Saturday, worsening what is already a longstanding humanitarian nightmare for the 18,000 residents of the Yarmouk refugee camp.
This won’t end well.
[T]he move suggests that as the Islamic State loses ground in Iraq and northeastern Syria, the most daring response it could muster on the ground was to attack one of the most vulnerable populations in Syria.
Most of all, the attack was a perverse answer to the question of how life in Yarmouk could get worse. Many residents’ very presence there is a scar from a previous war; they are descended from Palestinians who fled or were driven from their homes in the 1948 war over Israel’s founding.
The BBC reports that a few have managed to escape.
Unrwa spokesman Chris Gunness told the BBC that the situation in Yarmouk was extremely difficult.
“We now have an intense armed conflict raging in the streets, people are cowering in their homes, too terrified to move,” he said.
Some civilians have managed to leave. Unrwa confirmed that 94 civilians, including 43 women and 20 children, had escaped and been given humanitarian support.
The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Damascus told the BBC that hundreds more had fled from this area of Damascus over the past two days.
Another zero on humanity’s report card.
“Reports of killings and even beheadings were beginning to circulate on Saturday”
The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. — H.P. Lovecraft, “Call of Cthulhu”
The fact that the camp still exists after 66 years is pretty much another zero, as well.