Beirut: Trapped in towns besieged by fighting, deprived of food, water and electricity, Syrian civilians are now facing a new threat from the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
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Beyond the barrel bombs that have already killed thousands in indiscriminate aerial assaults, beyond the chemical attacks with cylinders of chlorine gas in civilian areas controlled by opposition forces, the Assad government is now dropping 200-kilogram naval mines from its helicopters into residential neighbourhoods.
Set to explode just a few metres from the ground, the naval mines, designed to float in the sea and detonate as a warship approaches, are packed with high-intensity explosives that cause extraordinary damage and terror, experts say.
And while there is evidence of the Syrian Armed Forces dropping these mines from helicopters as early December 2012, activists say since June there has been a significant increase in their use.
"It is now systematic," one rescue worker on the ground in Syria said.
While Western governments and their Arab allies are focused on the US-led coalition's fight against the so-called Islamic State, the Assad regime remains by far the biggest killer in a country slowly dying in its fifth year of war.
"Every time a city or an area is freed by the rebels the number of attacks by the regime increases as a way of preventing the development of any civil administration," says Raed al-Saleh, the head of Syria Civil Defence, a local volunteer search-and-rescue group that has over 2000 members across eight Syrian provinces.
"It is not just us as Civil Defence, the people of Syria in general have lost their hope in the international community - in our eyes the international community has lost its credibility when they could not come to a political solution" and instead turned their backs on Syria, he tells Fairfax Media from inside Syria.
"But we have work to do and we cannot stop - every day the bombs are falling, every day civilians are being targeted."
The Civil Defence teams do extraordinary work, arriving soon after the bombings to dig through enormous, unstable piles of rubble to rescue those trapped inside, fight the fires caused by explosions and give first aid at the scene.
It is estimated they have saved 22,000 lives since they began operating in 2013.
By far the most damage is caused by barrel bombs and lately, the even larger container bombs, experts say.
Dr Assad denies his army uses barrel bombs, but there is ample video evidence collected by local and international human rights groups that show Syrian helicopters dropping these huge bombs.
"Barrel bombs have become one of the most commonly used weapons in civilian areas in Syria - it is safe to assume that most areas are subjected to barrel bombs: in Aleppo, in Deraa, in Idlib and in the last few days in Zabadani as well," says Nadim Houry, deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa division.
"It is our assessment that the way they are being used is indiscriminate, they are dropped from very high altitudes, they are not sufficiently precise . . . and if you look at any of the accounting done by any Syrian groups, the overwhelming number of victims are civilians," Mr Houry says.
Attacks using barrel bombs - oil barrels, fuel tanks or gas cylinders packed with explosives, fuel, and metal fragments dropped from helicopters - have killed more than 3000 civilians in Aleppo province alone in the last year and more than 11,000 in Syria since 2012, according to Amnesty International.
More than 23 died on Tuesday when a container bomb was dropped into the neighbourhood of al-Bab in Aleppo, local monitoring groups reported, while three days earlier 34 people, most of them civilians, were killed in similar government raids on the town.
Al-Bab, around 30 kilometres north-east of Aleppo, has been held by IS since last year and is the target of frequent Syrian regime attacks on local food markets, refuelling stations and other residential buildings.
At least 230,000 people have been killed since the Syrian conflict broke out in March 2011, according to the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
This is the only death toll available since the United Nations announced in January 2014 that it had abandoned its count of the ongoing carnage in Syria, saying it was unable to verify sources or produce credible figures.
The UN briefly stepped back into the fray in August 2014 to announce that its data specialists had identified 191,369 people killed between March 2011 and April 2014, nothing it was "probably an underestimate of the real total number of people killed".
Back then, the serving UN human rights chief Navi Pillay said: "The killers, destroyers and torturers in Syria have been empowered and emboldened by the international paralysis."
It is a paralysis that continues to this day.
"Why has the UN stopped counting and why is there not more outrage that the UN stopped counting?" asks Mr Houry.
"If you look at any other recent conflict you get recent numbers from [the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs] OCHA, except when it comes to Syria."
There is no doubt, he says, the Syrian conflict is incredibly complex, with dozens of different militant groups on the ground as well as IS and the al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front.
However, it is unacceptable that "you cannot count how many children died of starvation in Yarmouk when it is a 10-minute drive from Damascus", Mr Houry says.
"If anyone wants to try to stop the killing of civilians in Syria it will require a much more sophisticated, complex and multi-layered thinking from policy makers that we have seen so far," he says.
"We have consistently called for keeping borders open for refugees, imposing an arms embargo on all parties, including the Syrian government [there is an arms embargo on IS and the Nusra Front but not on the Syrian government] . . . as well as releasing detainees and allowing humanitarian aid in."
On June 26 the United Nations Security Council sat down to discuss the growing horror of Dr Assad's crimes against his people.
Two years had passed since it endorsed the Geneva Communique aimed at ending the violence by establishing a transitional governing body made up of members of the present government and the opposition and other groups.
Mr Saleh from Syria Civil Defence was there to give testimony, describing just one day in June in which 44 barrel bombs as well as several rocket attacks and a chlorine gas attack terrorised exhausted civilians.
Barrel bombs "destroy everything, including schools, bakeries, hospitals, houses of worship and even cemeteries", he told the Security Council. "Because of them, the sounds of helicopters hovering in the Syrian sky became a source of terror and real panic for us and for all civilians. That sound means expecting death without knowing where exactly the barrel bomb will fall and whom it will kill.
"When sirens are set off, we get ready to respond to the location that the barrel bomb hits. We try with our simple tools to search for people under the rubble, and in many cases we only find the dead bodies and limbs of our neighbours and friends and sometimes relatives."
He described a new fear generated by the Syrian Air Force's policy of "double taps", where the aircraft returns to bomb the same location minutes later when rescue teams arrive and people gather to save what is left.
"We have lost 92 members of our search and rescue teams so far," he said, mostly as a result of this practice.
Adding to the desperation on the ground, the Syrian government has renewed its use of toxic chemicals in several barrel bomb attacks in the Idlib province in April and May, Human Rights Watch warned after interviewing local doctors and first aid responders to the sites of three attacks, who reported a distinctive chlorine smell.
The use of chlorine as a weapon in Syria has been previously documented, in particular by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, who reported in September 2014 "with a high degree of confidence, that chlorine was used as a weapon systematically and repeatedly in three villages in northern Syria".
It has been 17 months since the UN Security Council passed Resolution 2139, calling on all parties to immediately cease attacks against civilians in Syria and lift the siege of populated areas.
"The Council demanded that all parties allow delivery of humanitarian assistance, cease depriving civilians of food and medicine indispensable to their survival, and enable the rapid, safe and unhindered evacuation of all civilians who wished to leave.
"It demanded that all parties respect the principle of medical neutrality and facilitate free passage to all areas for medical personnel, equipment and transport."
Just last week, the UN recorded 4 million Syrian refugees. More than 7.6 million are internally displaced and much of the country is paralysed with fear, war and starvation.
Resolution 2139 has never met its goals. As for the US-led coalition, of which Australia is a member, Syrians are asking why none of its firepower is directed towards protecting civilians from the force that is causing the most harm: the Assad regime.
