problems in converting restructuredtext with figures to markdown

[nye17]

I have rst files containing figure derivatives like

.. figure:: examples/foo.png
:scale: 80%

(the :scale part is correctly indented, spaces failed to show up here)
now I want this file to be converted into markdown using pandoc

pandoc -s -w rst --toc foo.rst -o foo.md

but the output file foo.md seems to completely ignore the figure inclusion lines without report an error or warning.