Updated 10/21/13 at 10:50 am
Oct. 21, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The image is gut-wrenching, although at first glance you might not realize anything is awry. An x-ray of a fully formed baby.  Everything looks perfectly normal. Everything, that is, except for a white, narrow triangular shape towards the front of the skull, the tip pointing directly toward the eye socket.
No, that's not a tumour. It’s a bullet, lodged in the brain of a baby who hadn’t yet had the chance to be born.
The x-ray purports to be evidence of what one British doctor who just returned from Syria claims is a disturbing trend in the war-torn country – snipers using civilians as target practice, and earning cigarettes for hitting the "right" targets.
While the authenticity of the x-ray, provided to media by a charity called Syrian Relief, has not been independently confirmed, Dr. Nott says his experiences were clear enough.
He says that pregnant women were repeatedly - and, he claims, deliberately - shot in the uterus, as part of a war game. On one day alone, he said, he saw half a dozen such women.
Dr. Nott, a vascular surgeon at Chelsea and Westminster hospital in London who has volunteered in numerous war zones, described what he saw in Syria as “hell beyond hell.”
“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,” Nott told The Times about how the sniper attacks that he saw followed distinct patterns.
“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].”
But the worst that he saw was the shooting of the pregnant women. “‘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.”
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Nott described operating on the pregnant women who had been shot as "one of the most distressing things you could possibly ever, ever do."
While the doctor said he couldn't be sure which side the snipers were working for, he said that he was told by others that they were snipers for the Assad regime.
The Assad government has, however, denied the reports as "totally baseless," and an attempt to tarnish its reputation.
Nott spent five weeks volunteering at a hospital in Syria.