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Deadly airstrike hits refugee camp in northern Syria Syrian government accused of airstrike on refugee camp
(about 1 hour later)
Airstrikes on a refugee camp housing Syrians uprooted by war killed 28 people near the Turkish border on Thursday, a UK-based monitoring group said. The government of Bashar al-Assad has been accused of bombing a Syrian refugee camp near the Turkish border, in an attack that activists and officials said left dozens dead of civilians and wounded.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the dead included women and children, and that the toll from the strikes, which hit a camp for internally displaced people near the town of Sarmada, was likely to rise. The airstrikes on Thursday afternoon near Sarmada, a town in Idlib province just 20km away from Reyhanli, left the camp in ruins, with one witness describing a scene of horror, with tents on fire and body parts strewn around the area.
Sarmada lies about 20 miles (30km) west of of Aleppo, where a cessation of hostilities brokered by Russia and the US brought a measure of relief on Thursday. But fighting continued nearby and President Bashar al-Assad said he still sought total victory over rebels in Syria. “We don’t know yet if it’s Syrian or Russian aircraft, but they struck in the middle of the camp and many of the tents have been burned,” said Alaa Fatraoui, a journalist based in the area who visited the scene after the late afternoon strike.
He added: “There are many martyrs and body parts. I saw with my own eyes nearly 30 dead. It’s a very bloody scene. It’s revenge against civilians. There are absolutely no armed men there, they’re all civilian refugees, homeless people living on the street.”
The opposition’s Syrian National Coalition said that more than 30 people were killed in the attack and dozens were injured. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group with contacts inside Syria, said dozens had been left dead or wounded, seven of whom were children.
Images provided by activists in the area showed civil defence workers putting out fires with debris and burned out tent husks on the ground.
The camp, called al-Kammouneh, is believed to have as many as 500 tents, with about six or seven family members on average per household. The majority of them are civilians who fled the fighting in the countryside in nearby Aleppo province, where an offensive by the Syrian government is threatening to cause a humanitarian catastrophe.
A cessation of hostilities brokered by Russia and the US brought a measure of relief on Thursday to Aleppo. But fighting continued nearby and Assad said he still sought total victory over rebels in Syria.
Syrian state media said the army would abide by a “regime of calm” in the city that came into effect at 1am (2200 GMT on Wednesday) for 48 hours, after two weeks of death and destruction.Syrian state media said the army would abide by a “regime of calm” in the city that came into effect at 1am (2200 GMT on Wednesday) for 48 hours, after two weeks of death and destruction.
The army blamed Islamist insurgents for violating the agreement overnight by what it called indiscriminate shelling of some government-held residential areas of divided Aleppo. Residents said the violence had eased by morning and more shops had opened up. The latest attack highlighted the growing savagery of the conflict in the aftermath of the collapse of a ceasefire deal brokered by the US and Russia meant to pave the way for peace negotiations.
Heavy fighting was reported in the southern Aleppo countryside near the town of Khan Touman, where al-Qaida’s Syrian branch, Nusra Front, is dug in close to a stronghold of Iranian-backed militias, a rebel source said. The talks in Geneva were deadlocked amid the government delegation’s refusal to discuss a transition that would see Assad eased out of power, and the ceasefire’s fate was effectively sealed by the launch of the regime’s offensive last weekend in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and its former commercial capital.
Government forces carried out air attacks on the area and rebels were attacking government positions around the town, pro-Syrian government television channel al-Mayadeen and the Observatory said. It comes days after the government destroyed a hospital backed by the International Committee of the Red Cross and Médecins sans Frontières, killing the last paediatrician left in rebel-held eastern Aleppo, and a rebel attack on a maternity hospital in the government-controlled west of the city.
Pro-opposition media said an Islamist insurgent carried out a suicide bomb attack against government positions in Khan Touman. The attack raises questions over the safety of refugees who were uprooted in the war and settled in refugee camps near the Turkish border. Ankara has repeatedly called for safe zones in the area to protect the refugees from airstrikes, but the proposals have been met with a shrug by western powers involved in the conflict. Refugees fleeing recent fighting have been kept on the Syrian side of the border rather than be admitted into Turkey.
A TV station controlled by the Lebanese group Hezbollah, which is fighting alongside the Syrian army, said the army used a guided missile to destroy a suicide car bomb before it reached its target in that area.
Elsewhere in Syria, fighting persisted. Isis militants captured the Shaer gas field in the east of the country, the first gain for the jihadists in the Palmyra desert area since they lost the ancient city in March, according to rebel sources and a monitor.
Amaq, an Isis-affiliated news agency, said militants killed at least 30 Syrian troops stationed at Shaer and seized heavy weapons, tanks and missiles. Russian war jets were also reported to have struck militant hideouts in the town of Sukhna in the same Palmyra desert area.
Assad said he would accept nothing less than an outright victory in the five-year-old conflict against rebels across Syria, state media reported. In a telegram to Vladimir Putin thanking Moscow for its military support, Assad said the army was set on “attaining final victory” and “crushing the aggression”.
The Observatory said at least one person was killed overnight in rebel shelling of the Midan neighbourhood on the government-held side of Aleppo, which was Syria’s commercial hub and largest city before the war. Twenty rockets fell on government-held parts of Aleppo on Thursday, state media said.
But a resident of the rebel-held eastern part of the city said that although warplanes flew overnight, there was no sign of the intense raids seen during the past 10 days of airstrikes.
People in several districts ventured on to the streets where more shops than normal had opened, the resident of al-Shaar neighbourhood said.