Dear Partners,

It is with a profound sadness and a great anger that I am informing you about the death of three members of one of our local partners: the Farmers Union in Eastern Ghouta. They have been killed last Thursday in yet another airstrike on Douma by the regime’s forces.

Hasan Bargouth, Farid Bwedani and Amin Al-Kasir were three founding members of the Farmer’s Union in Eastern Ghouta, a civil society initiative, supported by our action with the help of fund provided by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Farmers Union was by launched farmers and agriculture engineers in order to allow them to organize their work and to combine their efforts in taking cooperative and coordinated actions to help the local communities in surviving through the siege imposed by the regime.

We in LDSPS hold again the international community responsible for the continuation of war crimes in Syria. Our silence is complicity; our absence of action is participation.

We call again on you, our partners, to put all the pressure that you can on your governments to stop the killing of the civilians and to put to the ground all the airplanes that are targeting them, whomever they belong to, and above all, the regime and Russian air-forces. In addition, we call on you to do the necessary and possible to hold the commanders of the repetitive attacks the civilians of Eastern Ghouta and the rest of Syria accountable for their acts and bring them to face international justice.

As we send all of our condolences to the Farmers Union and to the families of the three members who lost their lives trying to help others, we owe them to continue our struggle for freedom and dignity.