Volunteer doctor, British surgeon David Nott, says that Syrian snipers are targeting women late in their pregnancies “as a game.” The women were all shot through their uterus and a chilling X-ray of one woman’s womb shows a fetus with a bullet lodged in its brain.

“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,” said Dr. Nott. “Most of the children removed were seven, eight, nine months gestation.”

Dr. Nott volunteers for a charity that aids Syrians in need. Syria Relief, a U.K.-based charity, is set up “to help and support Syrian families and individuals in need, in Syria and outside it.” Nott has worked in several Syrian hospitals and has seen as many as six pregnant women with gunshot wounds to the uterus in one day. He said he began to notice a pattern of women and children being injured daily by what seem to be sniper bullets. And, many of them were in the same area of the body, as if the snipers were using real people for target practice.

"After a while we noticed that there were certain trends going on," Nott said. "We had some days, say, 10 or 15 gunshot wounds of which eight or nine of them were targeted in one particular area. So for example, one day, we received say 15, 16 gunshot wounds and of that eight to nine were targeted in the left groin only.”

Syria is in the midst of a deadly civil war. The country grabbed the whole world’s attention in late August when the Syrian government killed hundreds and injured thousands of its own civilians — including small children — using the chemical weapon sarin. Since then, leaders worldwide have been calling on the country’s leaders to relinquish its chemical weapons as soon as possible.

Nott says that the crisis in Syria is unlike anything he’s ever seen. Civilians are being targeted, rather than caught in the crossfire.

“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 said. "I was there for five weeks and I was exhausted at the end of it.”

Watch a video of Nott explaining what he witnessed below: