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The satellite images showing how Assad is obliterating a Damascus suburb while normal life continues yards away
Damascus is a tale of two cities. On the one side, buildings stand tall, divided by neat rows of flowering trees. On the other, a vision of hell.
In the government-controlled west people attend work, school and dinner parties in the evening. In besieged rebel-held Eastern Ghouta just a few hundred yards away, they hide in basements waiting for the next air strike.
The military siege of the eastern suburb of the capital, which is home to nearly 400,000 residents, began in 2013 and has become the longest and most brutal in modern history.
For the last five years the 40sqm enclave has been pummeled by Syrian regime and more recently Russian bombs, in an attempt to dislodge the opposition from its most important stronghold and protect President Bashar al-Assad’s seat of power.
Satellite imagery captured last week by McKenzie Intelligence and shared with the Telegraph lays bare for the first time the sheer level of destruction in Eastern Ghouta.
The most striking image shows the dividing line between al-Qassaa district on the regime side and Jobar on the rebel side. Small grey smudges are all that remains of levelled buildings. Craters pockmark the roads and whole streets have disappeared off the map.
Smoke can be seen rising from some of the more recent strikes.
“There is little sign of daily life here,” McKenzie’s Stuart Ray, a former British military intelligence analyst, said. “We could see no cars driving through or people on the streets, no shopkeepers opening their stores. It’s a wasteland.”
According to a United Nations estimate, some 91 per cent of Jobar has been destroyed by regime strikes, which have increased in intensity in recent weeks.
Explore the devastation using interactive map:
Government territory is regularly hit by mortars fired from rebel areas of Ghouta, but the resulting damage is incomparable to the devastation caused by barrel bombs.
Analysis carried out by UN experts identified approximately 3,853 destroyed, 5,141 severely damaged and 3,547 moderately damaged buildings in the more densely-populated western parts of the enclave.
In the Ein Terma neighbourhood of Eastern Ghouta, where 18,500 people still live, the most recent satellite images show 71 per cent of buildings are now destroyed or damaged.
In Zamalka, another major neighbourhood in the suburb, 59 per cent of buildings are destroyed or damaged and there has been no water or electricity network for at least two years.
The Russian and Syrian bombs do not discriminate, targeting civilian areas such as schools and hospitals on an almost daily basis.
Since the government’s offensive escalated in mid-February, 14 medical facilities have been taken out of service as a result of government attacks, according to the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organisations (UOSSM), which operates hospitals there.
More than 10 medical staff and volunteers have also been killed and 20 injured.
Doctors have taken to treating and operating on patients underground to escape the air strikes.
Mr Ray said the satellite imagery showed evidence of some precision strikes, where perhaps a command and control centre was hit using intelligence, but for the most part Assad’s regime seemed to simply target the most densely populated civilian areas in a "scorched earth" approach.
“If you look at Sarajevo, which was under siege for four years, the damage is incomparable," he told the Telegraph. "Even the worst hit areas of Sarajevo, like Dobrinja, had some buildings still standing.”
He said there was possible evidence the Syrian government had used thermobaric weapons, a type of explosive that uses oxygen from the surrounding air to generate a high-temperature explosion, in an area west of the district of Douma.
"All the trees and vegetation is gone, the buildings are no longer there but there's no craters as you would expect," he said. "That to us looks like a thermobaric attack.
"It's possible they were trying to completely clear that area to serve as a buffer zone as it's near the front line."
The conflict will enter its eighth year later this month, having killed hundreds of thousands of people and forced half of the pre-war population of 23 million from their homes.
Eastern Ghouta is not the first Syrian territory to be decimated. Huge swathes of Homs, Aleppo and Raqqa are now unlivable after campaigns to oust rebel fighters in the first two cases and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) in the latter.
“Eastern Ghouta is straight out of the Aleppo playbook,” one Western diplomat told the Telegraph. “I’m afraid we’ll have no option but to sit and watch it all play out again.
“What we saw in Aleppo could pale in comparison to what’s to come in Eastern Ghouta, however,” he warned.
The suburb’s some 20,000 fighters have spent the last five years preparing for this offensive. While its civilian population is almost quadruple that of the opposition’s territory in eastern Aleppo.
There is a fear Eastern Ghouta will become a battle of attrition. Assad’s “starve or surrender” tactic, as it has become known, has proved effective in the past and much less costly for his troops.
Cut off from the outside world, residents of the enclave are dependent on what they can grow for food and whatever they can smuggle in through one of their few remaining tunnels.
Tending to crops has become a deadly business however, and few now dare to venture out to the fields in full view of the drones overhead.
Today, bread in Eastern Ghouta costs nearly 22 times the amount it does it government-held Damascus. Several children have already died of malnutrition, and the longer the siege continues the greater the risk of starvation.
Aleppo fell within weeks of the government’s offensive beginning in earnest in early Dec. 2016. Eastern Ghouta could take months.
Under a truce declared by Russia, Syrian government this week opened up a so-called humanitarian corridor for those who want and are able to leave the area.
So far only two people have passed through it.
Residents fear a repeat of Aleppo, where civilians who made it out of the city after it fell to regime forces were tortured, arrested or displaced to other opposition-held areas of the country.
“Russia is the only one who can stop this now,” the diplomat said frankly. “But they seem completely impervious to international condemnation and shame.”
However he noted at January peace talks in the Russian city of Sochi there appeared to be growing daylight between the Syrian and Russian positions.
"There are real tensions emerging, it was remarkable how hostile Damascus was to the Sochi initiative,” he said. “On the final day of the peace talks, they tried three times to strong-arm (Russian foreign minister Sergei) Lavrov to change the final communique. They seem to be in completely different places.
"The $54,000 question is whether Russia is serious about exerting pressure on Assad, or whether it is even capable any more.”
Syria has always been a stubborn client for Russia, mostly recently defying Moscow’s ceasefire for Eastern Ghouta.
In turn, the UN has become increasingly frustrated at being held to ransom by President Vladimir Putin.
"We cannot afford to have the luxury of giving up,” Staffan de Mistura, the UN’s beleaguered Syria envoy said on Thursday. “So any type of feeling that the UN is frustrated: Forget it.”