As Syria continues to turn into a state-wide war zone, a particularly gruesome pattern seems to be emerging. The Assad regime appears to be targeting bakeries in pro-rebel towns, thereby ensuring huge casualties.
The reason bakeries are such a “high value” target is that shortages of fuel and flour have resulted in erratic bread production throughout the country, thus there are often huge numbers of people waiting hours in line for bread.
According to Al-Arabiya, activists at the scene of a bakery bombing Sunday, December 23, in Halfaya said that hundreds of people were waiting to purchase bread when a jet dropped a bomb. Halfaya is located in the central region of Hama.
A video taken at the scene shortly after the bomb landed, showed dozens of bodies in piles, and dying people and bloody body parts strewn throughout the area. People can be seen looking through the piles of bodies, presumably searching for relatives. There are also many people taking pictures of the carnage; some continued taking pictures when wounded looked to them beseechingly for help.
Prior to sunday’s attack, one of the bloodiest single attacks in the Syrian civil war was the bombing of a bakery in Aleppo on August 16. sixty people were killed in the August bakery bombing.