One-month-old Sahar, her ribs protruding under translucent skin, breathed her last on Sunday in Syria’s Eastern Ghouta, where a crushing regime siege has pushed hundreds of children to the brink of starvation.
Only a trickle of humanitarian aid ever reaches this rebel-held region east of Damascus, under a tight blockade by Assad regime forces since 2013.
Eastern Ghouta is one of four “de-escalation zones” set up in May under a deal between backers of rival sides in Syria’s devastating six-year war.
But food supplies still rarely enter the region, where medical officials say hundreds of children are suffering acute malnutrition.
On Saturday, the parents of Sahar Dofdaa, just 34 days old, took her to a hospital in the Eastern Ghouta town of Hamouria.
Images filmed by a reporter working with AFP showed a wide-eyed girl with listless eyes and little but skin on her bones.
She tried to cry but lacked the strength to make much of a noise. Her young mother sobbed nearby.
Her skeletal thighs poked out of a nappy way over her size. 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.
Her death came after another child in Ghouta also died of malnutrition on Saturday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
“Residents suffer from severe food shortages, and when goods are available in the markets, it’s at a crazy price,” the Observatory said.
