Via Times of Israel:

The Economist Intelligence Unit listed Damascus, the capital of Syria, in last place among the 140 cities surveyed in its Global Liveability Ranking for 2015, which was released this week. First place went to Melbourne, Australia.

The study surveyed, among other things, the security of the cities’ inhabitants and how it affected their lives. One can hardly argue with the finding about Syria’s capital: About 110 inhabitants of Douma, a Damascus suburb about 15 kilometers from the city center, were killed just this week.

At 2 p.m. on Sunday, the Syrian Air Force bombed the city’s central marketplace, killing and wounding hundreds. Eyewitnesses said piles of corpses were strewn among the fruit and vegetables.

The next morning, after an explicit United Nations condemnation of the Syrian attack, President Bashar Assad proved how much he believed in the famously dismissive Israeli expression about the UN, “Oom, shmoom” (“Oom” being the acronym in Hebrew for the UN), by dispatching his aircraft back to Douma for another bombing sortie.

For Assad, the eastern outskirts of Damascus are a preferred target. In August 2013, he attacked Ghouta al-Sharqiya, a suburb near Douma, with chemical weapons — an incident that eventually led to an agreement on Syria relinquishing its chemical arsenal. Douma, and mainly Ghouta al-Sharqiya, are considered strongholds of the Islamist opposition group Jaish al-Islam (the Army of Islam), which does not identify with the Islamic State. The regime claims that the Syrian aircraft attacked the headquarters of Jaush al-Islam, but members of the group say that its headquarters are located three kilometers away from the Douma marketplace.

Jaish al-Islam’s presence inside Damascus is not the main problem Assad faces for control of the capital. For the Syrian president, the prime concern is the Islamic State’s advance toward Damascus. The various opposition groups, notably including IS, are slowly closing in on Assad’s home.

IS already has a presence in the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk, adjacent to the city, where it is working against the regime together with activists from Al-Nusra Front (which is fighting against IS in other sectors in Syria, such as the Golan Heights front). For IS, Damascus is the bottom-line goal.

It is not a secret target; IS has promised more than once that it will conquer the capital. The pace of its progress, at least for now, is quite slow. It captured Palmyra several months ago. Raqqa, Islamic State’s capital city, is fairly distant, but its people have succeeded in reaching Bir Qassab, roughly 40 kilometers southeast of Damascus, and for now they have stopped there.