The destruction in Syria's Eastern Ghouta is overwhelming and the humanitarian needs huge, a top Red Cross official said Friday after visiting the former opposition stronghold outside Damascus.
Dominik Stillhart, director of operations for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said the scope of the devastation was still emerging, six months after the fighting ended.
"I was really overwhelmed by the level of destruction that we found in Eastern Ghouta. I've never seen anything like this ever before," he told journalists in Beirut.
After retaking significant territory from ISIS, the regime set its sights on recapturing Eastern Ghouta earlier this year, viewing the opposition presence so close to the capital as an affront to its authority.
It launched a massive Russian-backed offensive against the besieged enclave that killed more than 1,700 civilians.
Tens of thousands of people fled as the enclave's towns surrendered one after the other.
Residents have been trickling back to the area but the lack of infrastructure, the fear of arrest and the risk posed by unexploded ordnance are preventing mass returns.
"In some parts of Eastern of Ghouta like Harasta where we were, up to 90 percent of infrastructure is completely destroyed," Stillhart said.
"It's really breathtaking the level of destruction there," he said after his first visit to the area.
Meanwhile, a United Nations official said that UN-led aid delivery, critically needed by thousands of civilians stranded in a camp on the Syrian-Jordanian border, has been postponed and will not arrive on Saturday as was expected by community leaders.
“The planned joint UN-Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) humanitarian convoy to Rukban camp has been delayed for logistical and security reasons,” Fadwa Abed Rabou Baroud, a Damascus-based UN official, told Reuters on Friday.
“The UN remains ready to deliver aid for the 50,000 people in need as soon as conditions allow,” Baroud added.
In the last three years, tens of thousands of people have fled to the camp from ISIS-held parts of Syria being targeted by Russian and US-led coalition air strikes.
A siege earlier this month by the Syrian army and a block on aid by Jordan has depleted food at the desert camp where the borders of Syria, Jordan and Iraq meet.
That has led to at least a dozen deaths in the past two weeks among its more than 50,000 inhabitants, mainly women and children, residents and UN sources told Reuters.
