Paying the Price of War: An innocent malnourished Syrian baby died of hunger
One-month-old Sahar, breathed her last on Sunday in Syria’s Eastern Ghouta, where a crushing regime siege has pushed hundreds of children to the die of starvation.
On Saturday, the parents of Sahar Dofdaa, just 34 days old, took her to a hospital in the Eastern Ghouta town of Hamouria.
When a new born is supposed to be all chubby, here is a true image of a wide-eyed girl with listless eyes, skeleton legs and little but skin on her bones from Syria’s Eastern.
She tried to cry but lacked the strength to make much of a noise. Her young mother sobbed nearby.
Placed on the scales, she weighed less than two kilogrammes (just over 4 pounds).
Like hundreds of children in Ghouta, Sahar was suffering from acute malnutrition.
Her mother was too undernourished to breastfeed her and her father, earning a pittance at a butcher’s shop, was unable to afford milk and supplements.
Sahar died at the hospital on Sunday morning and her parents took her -- their only child -- to their nearby town of Kafr Batna to bury her.
Food supplies still rarely enter the region, where medical officials say hundreds of children are suffering acute malnutrition.
According to UN figures, some 400,000 people live in besieged parts of Syria, the majority in Eastern Ghouta.
-PTC News
