FILE PHOTO
Thu 21 November 2019:
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, in an updated toll, said a ground-to-ground missile fired by an regime and Iranian forces that hit a makeshift camp for the displaced near Qah village close to the border with Turkey killed 15 civilians, including six children, and wounded around 40 others.
The missile crashed near a maternity facility in the camp, it said.
#Watch the burning of dozens of tents in the camps of #Qah north of #Idlib after being targeted by the Assad regime with missiles internationally prohibited pic.twitter.com/gr9z3UAdBu
— hussien khattab (@hussinkhattab) November 20, 2019
Internally displaced refugees were reported to be among those killed, while some of the injured were taken to Turkish hospitals across the border in Hatay.
Meanwhile footage of tents engulfed in flames circulated social media, along with dozens of wounded children being treated on hospital floors.
Elsewhere, “Russian military aircraft” targeted the town of Maaret al-Numan in the south of the province, the Observatory said, and “six civilians were killed, among them four children”.
A number of people were wounded in the raid, some “in a critical state”, and the toll there was likely to rise, the Britain-based monitor’s head Rami Abdel Rahman reported.
The northwestern Idlib region is dominated by Islamists of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group (HTS), formerly the Syrian affiliate of Al-Qaeda.
However the enclave has become the last-resort place of refuge for 3 million Syrians fleeing the conflict and regime brutality in other parts of the country.
Most of Idlib province remains out of the control of the Syrian regime, as do adjacent areas of Aleppo, Hama and Latakia provinces.
The Observatory has a wide network of sources on the ground and determines those responsible for such raids by the type of aircraft and weaponry used, as well as their flight plan.
Between the end of April and the end of August, Idlib was pounded ceaselessly by Syrian soldiers backed by Russian air power.
The Observatory estimates that nearly 1,000 civilians were killed in that period, and the UN says that more than 400,000 people were displaced.
Moscow announced a ceasefire at the end of August, but the Observatory says there have been sporadic attacks since then, and that dozens of civilians have been killed.
On October 22, in his first visit to the embattled northwestern region since 2011, Assad said defeating militants there was the key to ending the country’s eight-year-old civil war.
The war in Syria has killed more than 370,000 people and displaced millions.
According Syria’s Response Coordination Group, a local non-governmental organization, the attacks of the Assad regime and its supporter Russia has displaced some 40,000 civilians in the first half of November within the Idlib de-escalation zone.
Turkey and Russia agreed last September to turn Idlib into a de-escalation zone where acts of aggression are expressly prohibited.
The Syrian regime and its allies, however, have consistently broken the terms of the cease-fire, launching frequent attacks inside the zone.
The de-escalation zone is currently home to some four million civilians, including hundreds of thousands displaced in recent years by regime forces from throughout the war-weary country.
Syria has been locked in a vicious civil war since early 2011, when the regime cracked down on pro-democracy protests with unexpected ferocity.
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