With half a dozen people already confirmed dead from starvation and the situation likely to worsen as winter takes hold, the Bashar al-Assad regime is engaged in what journalists are describing as a “terror-famine.”

Children in Syria are now eating leaves for nutrition. Residents of the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp are baking flatbreads made from “stale lentils”…In Moadamiyah, one of the suburbs south of Damascus known as western Ghouta, gassed with sarin by the regime on August 21, residents subsist on a meager diet of olives, mint, grapevine leaves and figs.

Regime forces have been strangling rebel-held towns of all humanitarian supplies for almost a year, and a group of Syrian clerics recently had to issue a fatwa allowing war victims to eat cats, dogs, and donkeys for sustenance. Violence has complicated efforts by regime opponents and humanitarian workers to deliver aid to besieged Syrians. Over the weekend, more than 30 people were killed in a suicide bombing at a military checkpoint in central Syria.

The attack, which was reported both by the state-run news media and by antigovernment activists, shook the city of Hama, ignited dozens of cars and sent up a column of smoke visible for miles around. One activist said the secondary explosions of bursting gas tanks had continued long after the initial blast.

The attack was linked to the Al Nusra front, an Al Qaeda offshoot, and came just a day after another suicide bombing in Damascus killed more than a dozen people. Seven Red Cross and Red Crescent volunteers were recently kidnapped in northwestern Syria, and the fighting has prevented medical personnel from conducting immunization campaigns. The World Health Organization reports that it is receiving reports of a polio outbreak, the first in more than a decade, inside Syria.

[Photo: UgaritNews / YouTube]