Sahar Dofdaa lived a tragically short and painful life. With sunken eyes and frail, protruding bones, the famished infant hardly stood a chance. Trapped in a Syrian conflict zone, her mother was too malnourished to breastfeed, and her father too impoverished to afford milk supplements.

Freelance journalist Amer Almohibany photographed Sahar for the last time at a medical facility in the war-torn country on Saturday. She died hours later, barely a month old and weighing just 4 pounds.

Almohibany’s heart-wrenching images of the emaciated newborn have once again turnedWesternattention to the Syrian regime’s siege of eastern Ghouta, where as many as 400,000 people reside, including Sahar’s parents.

Hundreds of civilians in the dilapidated Damascus suburb ― more than half of them children ― have died from food and medication shortages since the siege began in 2012, the Syrian Network for Human Rights said in a report released Tuesday.

Experts warn President Bashar Assad’s government is tightening its noose in the region, causing the already dire situation to deteriorate further.

“They’re really pushing the enclave to the brink of catastrophe for hundreds of thousands of people,” Valerie Szybala, executive director of the Washington-based Syria Institute, told HuffPost. “There’s nothing hopeful to grab onto here.”

Ghouta Under Siege

Eastern Ghouta has been under complete siege since 2013, shortly after a sarin gas attack by regime forces killed an estimated 1,429 people there.

For Assad, encircling Syrian territory and populations is a way to exert dominance and control while defying international human rights actors who oppose his leadership. He has kept the rebel-held area under an increasingly tight blockade, preventing his own desperate citizens from fleeing and keeping them from urgently needed aid supplies, with few exceptions.