Sun 23 June 2019:
Assad regime airstrikes on an anti-regime stronghold in northwestern Syria Saturday killed eight civilians including three children, a war monitor said. The Idlib region of some three million people is supposed to be protected by a September buffer zone deal, but the enclave has come under mounting bombardment by the regime and its ally Russia since late April. Three civilians were killed in an airstrike in the town of the Saraqib, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. An AFP reporter at the scene saw rescue workers extract the body of a woman from the rubble of a destroyed building.
After night fell, they searched for other victims, the lamps on their white helmets casting light onto the ruins in the dark. Earlier, two children were killed in a garage on the edge of the town of Maaret al-Numan, while another child died in the village of Maar Zita, the Britain-based monitoring group said. Two other civilians perished in strikes on the villages of Kansafra and Khan al-Subul, it said. Turkey and Russia inked a buffer zone in September deal to prevent a massive regime offensive on the Idlib region, near the Turkish border.
