Describing an attack on the al-Fardous district of Syria's second city, he said: 'I saw children without heads, body parts everywhere. It was how I imagine hell to be.'

A surgeon in Aleppo said the level of injuries he'd seen caused by barrel bombs was unprecedented. 'Barrel bombs are the most horrible and hurtful weapon … [We deal with] multi-trauma, so many amputations, intestines out of the body, it's too horrible,' he said.

The harrowing accounts emerged in a 62-page Amnesty International report, 'Death everywhere: War crimes and human rights abuses in Aleppo', including recollections from survivors of eight barrel bomb attacks.

The report paints a distressing picture of the devastation and bloodshed caused by barrel bombs - crudely fashioned weapons using oil barrels, fuel tanks or gas cylinders packed with explosives, fuel and metal fragments, which have been dropped by government force helicopter on schools, hospitals, mosques and crowded markets. 

Many hospitals and schools have sought safety by moving into basements or underground bunkers in the fifth year of Syria's civil war, which now involves government forces, rebels groups including the Free Syrian Army, so-called Islamic State fighters and Kurdish groups.

'There is no sun, no fresh air, we can't go upstairs and there are always airplanes and helicopters in the sky,' said one doctor whose field hospital is among those forced underground. 

'We are always nervous, always worried, always looking to the sky,' a teacher from Aleppo added.

Another resident described Aleppo as 'the circle of hell': 'The streets are filled with blood. The people who have been killed are not the people who were fighting.' 

Barrel bombs killed more than 3,000 civilians in Aleppo governorate alone last year, and more than 11,000 in Syria since 2012. Last month local activists recorded at least 85 barrel bomb attacks in Aleppo city, killing at least 110 civilians. 

Yet the Syrian government has failed to acknowledge a single civilian casualty caused by such attacks, with President Bashar al-Assad categorically denying that barrel bombs had ever been used by his forces in a BBC interview in February.

One barrel bomb attack struck a crowded market in the Sukkari district while 150 people were waiting in a queue to receive food baskets from a humanitarian distribution point nearby. 

An eyewitness described the aftermath of the attack as 'pure horror', saying the bomb had targeted civilians: 'There was the man who ran the ice-cream shop, the man who ran the sandwich shop, the man who ran the toy store ... They were all killed.' 

Armed opposition groups in Aleppo also committed war crimes by using imprecise weapons such as mortars and improvised rockets fitted with gas canisters called 'hell cannons' in attacks that killed at least 600 civilians in 2014. 

(dailymail.co.uk)