The unborn children of Syrian women are the targets of a sickening war game where a shooter who murders a foetus in its mother’s womb is awarded with cigarettes, a British surgeon has revealed.

Dr David Nott witnessed evidence of fighters using civilians as target practice and on several occasions shooting pregnant women in the stomach, killing their unborn babies.

Dr Nott, recently returned from volunteering at a Syrian hospital, said there are local rumours the snipers are sell swords, working for the Assad regime, awarded when they ‘hit the correct targets’.

Horrifying: The x-ray image shows a full-term foetus with a bullet lodged in its brain, shot dead in its mother’s womb

Dr Nott, a vascular surgeon at Chelsea and Westminster hospital in London, has told of the horrors suffered by civilians caught between government troops and rebels, describing it as ‘hell beyond hell’.

As women and children cross through the unnamed city where he was stationed, they would be shot by snipers – and their wounds followed disturbing patterns,

‘From the first patients that came in in the morning, you could almost tell what you would see for the rest of the day. It was a game,’ he told The Times.

War surgeon: Dr David Nott, pictured in 2008, treated civilian victims in Syria

‘One day it would be shots to the groin. The next, it would only be the left chest. The day after, we would see no chest wounds; they were all neck [wounds].’

Dr Nott told the newspaper that in his 20 years volunteering in war zones, this is the first time he had witnessed pregnant women being targeted.

He described the day two consecutive patients arrived at his clinic, heavily pregnant with their babies shot to death in their stomachs.

‘The women were all shot through the uterus, so that must have been where they were aiming for. I can’t even begin to tell you how awful it was.

‘Usually, civilians are caught in the crossfire. This is the first time I’ve ever seen anything like this. This was deliberate. It was hell beyond hell.’

Dr Nott, who counts Tony Blair among his former patients, has returned to London after five weeks in Syria to reveal abysmal conditions in the local hospitals with little to no evidence of aid.

The civil war in Syria show no evidence of slowing down today as government air force jets bombarded the eastern city of Deir al-Zor on Friday.

Heavy overnight clashes saw the killing of dozens of rebels and pro-Assad forces, including one of the president’s top military intelligence officers, activists said.

General Jama’a Jama’a was shot dead on Thursday by snipers in the midst of a battle with rebels including forces linked to al Qaeda, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

His death, celebrated by rebels and opposition activists, marked a significant setback for Assad’s bid to retain a hold over the city, capital of the eastern oil-producing province.

Chilling game: A British surgeon has revealed that snipers are targeting women and children as they fetch food and supplies. such as here in Homs where a girl is seen collecting water

Unfathomable cruelty: The game sees snipers ‘targeting’ different body parts on women and children and , according to local rumours, are awarded with cigarettes when they hit them (pictured is an opposition fighter in Syria’s northeastern city of Deir Ezzor)

 

Desperate; This little girl died of starvation shortly after she was filmed. There are reports that children are eating leaves because they are so hungrySyria’s civil war has killed more than 100,000 people and divided the Middle East between Sunni Gulf states and Turkey which mostly support the rebels, and Shi’ite Iran and Hezbollah which have backed Assad.

International efforts are growing to convene peace talks in Geneva next month, encouraged by rare agreement among global powers over the elimination of Syria’s chemical weapons after sarin gas attacks near Damascus in August.

But the United States and Russia, responding to Syria’s announcement that the talks would go ahead in Geneva on Nov. 23-24, said on Thursday that no date had yet been set.

The international envoy for Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, is due to hold talks in the Middle East next week to try to prepare for the negotiations, his spokeswoman said.

Read more: Daily Mail