Syrian Snipers Play Sick Game Of Bullet Tag With Pregnant Women, Body Parts

A surgeon who recently volunteered for a five-day tour of duty in the Syrian combat zone detailed a particularly troubling trend: snipers shooting at specific body parts for sport.

Bill Neely, international editor of ITV, produced a short video report of Dr. David Nott's tribulations in Syria.

Nott gets onto the subject of snipers during one of the interviews. To him, proof of the game is in the gunshot wounds he treats:

One day we'd have pregnant women being brought in with gunshot wounds to the uterus. Not just one or two, but seven or eight, which meant to me they (the snipers) must be targeting pregnant women.

And the following day, we would get people coming in with chest wounds to the right side of the chest.

The next day it would be the left side and no other injuries. Then it would be groin wounds; everybody would come in with a groin wound.

So it seemed to me that there was a death game going on with the snipers

Neely corroborated Nott's analysis, writing:

I have seen them myself in the last month; bored gunmen, peering through cracks in the breezeblock walls of their sniper's nest, locked in a conflict neither side seems capable of winning, shooting anything that moves.

Nott, who normally works in Britain, has donated a month each year to work as an emergency surgeon in war zones for the last 20 years.

Of course, the sniper tactics speak of armed men who have grown tired of the stalement and, under cover of general lawlessness, seek instead to terrorize the populace.

All told, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights - which tracks casualties in Syria - reports that 40,000 of the 110,000 killed in the war have been civilians. Of those, 4,000 were women and more than 5,800 were children.