At least 30 civilians were killed on Thursday after suspected Russian jet dropped bombs on a residential area in a besieged rebel enclave east of Syria’s capital, a war monitor said.
The monitor said “at least four bombs flattened two buildings in the Eastern Ghouta town of Misraba in an attack that killed more than 20 and wounded more than 40 people.
“Elsewhere in Eastern Ghouta, the last major rebel enclave near Damascus, at least 10 people were killed in aerial strikes in nearby towns,’’ the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and civil defence sources said.
The Observatory, a war monitor based in Britain, said 11 women and a child were among the dead in the strikes in Misraba, which it said were carried out by Russian planes.
Backed by Russian strikes, government forces escalated military operations against Eastern Ghouta in recent months.
It was seeking to tighten a siege that residents and aid workers called a deliberate use of starvation as a weapon of war, a charge the government denied.
Russia rejected Syrian opposition and rights groups’ accusations that its jets were responsible for deaths of thousands of civilians since its major intervention two years ago.
The intervention turned the tide in the country’s nearly seven-year-old war in favour of Syria President, Bashar al-Assad.
Moscow said it only attacked hardline Islamists.
Meanwhile, video footage posted on Thursday by activists on social media in Eastern Ghouta showed rescue workers pulling women and children from rubble.
The footage could not be independently confirmed.
Jets also pounded Harasta, on the western edge of the enclave, where rebels this week besieged and overran a major military base which residents say the army uses to pound residential areas.
The rebel assault aimed partly to relieve the pressure of the tightening siege.
The UN said that about 400,000 civilians besieged in the area face “complete catastrophe” because aid deliveries by the government are blocked.
It said that hundreds of people who need urgent medical evacuation have not been allowed outside the enclave.
Scores of hospitals and civil defence centres in Ghouta and across Syria have been bombed during the conflict in what the opposition said is a “scorched earth policy” to paralyze life in rebel-held areas.
Syrian state news agency SANA said that rebel shelling of the government-held capital Damascus killed one and injured 22 in the Amara district of the city.
Supported by Iran-backed militias and intensive Russian bombing, the Syrian army has since December waged a new campaign to push into the heart of another rebel-held part of Syria, Idlib province in the country’s northwest.
Idlib is a heavily populated area where over two million people live.
Rescue workers said there had been a spike in civilian casualties there in the last twenty days from stepped-up aerial strikes on residential areas, documenting 50 dead at least in that period.
“There have been at least six major massacres perpetrated by Russia in indiscriminate bombing of cities and towns with thousands fleeing their homes in the last two weeks,” Mustafa al Yousef, Head of Idlib’s Civil Defence said.
The Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS) charity, which supports the hospital, on Wednesday, said that the air strikes hit a maternity hospital in Idlib’s Ma‘arat al-Nu‘man city, killing five people.
The hospital, which SAMS said delivers around 30 babies a day, had been struck three times in four days and the last strikes temporarily put the hospital out of service.
Rescuers said that a family of seven was buried under rubble in Tel Dukan village overnight.
The army has been gaining ground in Idlib and the adjoining eastern Hama countryside, with scores of villages seized from rebels mainly belonging to Tahrir al Sham.
Tahrir al Sham is a coalition of jihadist groups with mainstream Free Syrian Army (FSA) factions also engaged in the battles. (Reuters/NAN)
