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Terrified children were among the victims today as Syrian tyrant Bashar Assad unleashed a new wave of terror from the skies.

Heartbreaking pictures show a number of youngsters, their dust-smeared faces streaked with tears, being rescued from the rubble after the latest indiscriminate bombing attack.

In one shocking image a baby, still in its blanket, is held aloft after being plucked alive from the debris of its home. Other pictures, too graphic to publish, appear to show a number of civilians, including children, lying lifeless in the street.

Assad’s air-strike was aimed at the embattled Damascus district of Douma – just a few miles from the president’s secretive base inside the capital’s diplomatic quarter.

Witnesses reported seeing military helicopters dropping devastating “barrel bombs” on crowded residential areas.

It is thought more than 100,000 have died in fighting in Syria in the past three years of civil war and millions of refugees have fled the bloodshed, sparked by the Arab Spring revolts throughout the Middle East.

Today's blitz came on the day the first batch of Syrian poison gas was shipped out of the country after Assad finally bowed to international pressure to hand over his chemical weapons for destruction.

It followed an appalling attack on the Ghouta agricultural belt around Damascus on the morning of August 21.

A team of UN inspectors has since confirmed that the nerve agent sarin was used in the rocket-strike, which left hundreds dead in the suburbs of Ain Tarma, Zamalka and Jobar.

Victims were seen foaming at the mouth and appeared to be asleep in pictures, although it later emerged they had been killed. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons confirmed last night that “priority chemical materials” were transported to the port of Latakia and onto a Danish vessel headed for international waters.

But it is not known how much of Syria’s toxic arsenal, which totals 1,300 tonnes, is still to be handed over.

Recent weeks have seen some of the fiercest since the civil war began.

Today the head of a group linked to al-Qaeda called for a ceasefire between the warring rebel factions after shocking videos appeared online of what appeared to be dead children being carried away from the site of the attack.

We will not publish those here, but others - such as the one below - show the extent of the damage caused in Duma.

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Abu Mohammed Golani, leader of the powerful Nusra Front, laid much of the blame for the in-fighting on an al-Qaeda breakaway group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.

While both groups have roots in the Islamist network and welcome foreign militants, the Nusra Front has largely avoided internal power struggles.

Golani said: “Many rebel units have committed transgressions, just as mistaken policies have played a prominent role in fuelling the conflict.

“In addition to this, there has been no agreement on legal solutions agreed upon by all major units.”

ISIL has also been fighting in neighbouring Iraq, where it faces an onslaught by tanks and artillery around the city of Fallujah, whose local leaders have urged the al-Qaeda militants to leave.

The extremists want to reconquer Iraq’s western Anbar province in a bid to create a radical Islamic state out of the chaos of the Syrian civil war.

More than 274 have been killed in rebel-on-rebel clashes in Syria since Friday, according to the country’s Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition monitoring group. Golani has proposed exchanging prisoners and forming an Islamic legal council to resolve rebel differences.

He added: “This unfortunate situation has pushed us to launch an initiative to save the battlefields from being lost.

“This will be done by forming an independent legal council by all the rebel factions in addition to a ceasefire.”

Golani urged the various factions not to become divided between foreign and local fighters, arguing that they all needed to pull together to help topple Assad.