by Lucy Bannerman, The Times, 19 October 2013



Pregnant women in Syria are being picked off by snipers in a sickening war game in which their unborn babies appear to be used for target practice, according to a British surgeon.







David Nott, who has just spent five weeks volunteering in a Syrian hospital, said that he and his despairing colleagues started to notice a disturbing pattern among the women and children who were being shot as they ran the daily gauntlet across a divided zone to buy food and supplies in a major city.





“One day it would be shots to the groin. The next, it would only be the left chest. The day after, we would see no chest wounds; they were all neck [wounds],” he said in an interview with The Times. “From the first patients that came in in the morning, you could almost tell what you would see for the rest of the day. It was a game. We heard the snipers were winning packets of cigarettes for hitting the correct number of targets.”





He said local rumours suggested that the snipers were mercenaries from China and Azerbaijan, working for the Assad regime. This cannot be verified.





Mr Nott has been volunteering as an emergency surgeon in war zones in countries such as Bosnia, Libya, Chad, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo for the past 20 years. However, he said that Syria was the only place in which he had witnessed civilians, and in particular pregnant women, being targeted.

