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New Death Tolls Reported in Protracted Syria Conflict Shelling of Bus in Northern Syria Caps a Merciless Year
(about 4 hours later)
More than two weeks of aerial bombings by Syrian government forces in the northern city Aleppo and the surrounding area have killed more than 500 people, and the death toll for the entire conflict in the country has surpassed 130,000, a rights group that opposes President Bashar al-Assad said Tuesday. BEIRUT, Lebanon — Half obscured by smoke and dust, a man in a video brandished a milk crate loaded with what he said were fragments of human flesh: the remains of people torn apart when a shell hit a city bus in Aleppo in northern Syria on Tuesday, the latest in a series of attacks on civilian targets by the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
The group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based organization with a network of contacts in Syria that has documented atrocities by combatants from both sides, said the Aleppo assaults were among the most intense in the conflict, which is nearly three years old. “Look, look, Bashar, they are humans, they are civilians,” the man shouted as others searched for more remains among the oranges stacked in a neat pyramid on a nearby cart — a grim end to a year of civil war in which the number of Syrian refugees quintupled and the death toll doubled.
The Syrian Observatory said the latest assaults reported on Tuesday included a direct missile hit on a bus in a rebel-held area of Aleppo that killed at least 10 people. It was impossible to independently corroborate its reporting. The explosion in the Tariq al-Bab area of Aleppo, which antigovernment activists said had killed at least 10 people, occurred not far from a market that was hit on Saturday. A second shell landed nearby as people tried to take the victims to hospitals, the activists said.
Syrian forces began escalating their siege of Aleppo in mid-December with a mix of conventional bombs, missiles and improvised mixes of explosives and shrapnel stuffed into barrels and dropped by helicopter gunships. These so-called barrel bombs are considered responsible for many of the most recent deaths in the city, which has been a protracted battleground between the government and rebels since the summer of 2012. The international aid group Doctors Without Borders, which provides medical assistance in rebel-held northern Syria, said on Tuesday that its contacts at 10 local hospitals had counted more than 540 people killed and more than 3,000 wounded in Aleppo during two weeks of intense government bombardment that has targeted schools, residential buildings, hospitals, markets and bus stations.
Rights groups and the United Nations have denounced the use of the barrel bombs, which kill and maim indiscriminately. Some opposition activists have complained that the positive publicity derived by Mr. Assad’s pledge to destroy all of his chemical arms has obscured the deaths and injuries caused by the military’s conventional weaponry. Government forces began to escalate their siege of Aleppo in mid-December with a combination of conventional bombs, missiles, and improvised mixes of explosives and shrapnel stuffed into barrels and dropped by helicopter gunships. These so-called barrel bombs are believed to be responsible for many of the recent deaths in the city, which has been a focal point of the conflict since the summer of 2012.
The Syrian government has presented an entirely different portrayal of military action in Aleppo, saying government forces have successfully eradicated nests of terrorists, its catchword for all armed resistance to Mr. Assad. The state-run news media elaborated on that theme on Tuesday, quoting the speaker of the People’s Assembly, Mohammad Jihad al-Lahem, as saying in its final session that Syria’s government had been vindicated in its stand, judging from a recent spate of bombings in other countries. Rights groups and the United Nations have denounced the use of the barrel bombs, which kill and maim indiscriminately. Some opposition activists complain that the positive publicity engendered by Mr. Assad’s pledge to destroy all of his chemical arms has obscured the barbaric deaths and injuries inflicted by the military’s conventional weaponry.
“Terrorism targeting Syria is expanding and beginning to affect Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, Iraq and most recently the Russian city of Volgograd, which confirms Syria’s warning about the need to confront terrorism,” the official news agency, Sana, quoted Mr. Laham as saying. The carrying out of the chemical arms deal fell behind schedule on Tuesday, with Syria missing an end-of-year deadline to move most of its chemical weapons out of the country. Syrian forces have not even started transporting the weapons to the port of Latakia for shipment, along a route that has been a battleground for weeks.
In a posting on its Facebook page, the Syrian Observatory provided a detailed tally of its compiled casualty statistics since the first reported death in the conflict that began on March 18, 2011, with the violent suppression of an anti-Assad protest in the southern city of Dara’a. As of Monday, it said, the deaths totaled 130,433, including 46,266 civilians, among them 7,014 children and 4,695 women. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the monitoring group based in The Hague and helping to oversee the destruction of the arsenal, had warned of the delay and said the government was not intentionally prolonging the operation.
The deaths also included 32,013 government soldiers, 19,729 pro-government militia members and informers, 19,937 rebel fighters, 2,233 military defectors, and 6,913 jihadists fighting on the rebel side, mostly non-Syrians from extremist groups, mainly the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and the Nusra Front, which both have links to Al Qaeda. In Aleppo, activists and residents described a growing sense of helplessness among the population, who feel besieged by threats from the sky and extremist insurgents in their midst, and abandoned by the world outside.
The United Nations has said for months that more than 100,000 people have died in the Syria conflict but has not updated that total. “It was artillery shelling this time, since there was rain and the warplanes couldn’t drop barrels,” said Ammar, an antigovernment activist from the area.
Despite a timetable for getting most deadly chemical weapons out of Syria by the end of this year, that deadline passed on Tuesday before Syrian forces had even started transporting them to the port of Latakia for shipment. But the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, The Hague-based monitoring group responsible for helping to oversee the destruction of the arsenal, had warned of the delay and said the Syrian government was not intentionally belaboring the operation. The danger did not come only from above, he said: Among the crowd of people who rushed to help after the bus was struck were fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, an extremist group that holds sway in many rebel areas. The fighters were looking for civilian activists they wanted to arrest — activists who are nominally allies in the fight against Mr. Assad, but are in practice treated as enemies because they are seen as insufficiently pious or because they disagree with the group’s vision of religious rule.
A Norwegian ship on standby to load the toxic chemical agents at Latakia docked instead in Cyprus on Monday night, said an observer who is close to Syrian operations and who spoke on condition of anonymity because the issue is politically delicate. One activist, Ammar said, was detained at the scene and had his camera confiscated, receiving it back only after lengthy mediation.
The director-general of the chemical weapons organization, Ahmet Uzumcu, said on Saturday that Syria would likely miss the year-end deadline, citing the volatile state of security and bad winter weather. Mr. Uzumcu has yet to comment on whether these delays will affect the Feb. 5 deadline that Syria faces for completing removal of all of its chemical agents, but the organization continues to take a positive view of progress toward eliminating Syria’s chemical weapons program. These activists have spent much of the past three years making videos of the aftermath of attacks to substantiate the opposition’s claims of indiscriminate violence against civilians by the Assad government. Hope has faded that these efforts will lead to international intervention, but they remain a way of showing defiance.
“We knew it was a mission based on very tight deadlines that would be met only if everything went perfectly,” Christian Chartier, a spokesman for the organization, said in a telephone interview. “It’s a mission we conduct a day at a time because every day brings new challenges. We are confident that once the train starts rolling it will roll fast.” In one video from Tuesday, as a camera panned across the charred bus from above, a small boy looked up and gave the victory sign.
The Syrian government has presented an entirely different picture of military action in Aleppo, saying its forces have successfully eradicated nests of terrorists — its catchword for all armed resistance to Mr. Assad. The state-run news media elaborated on that theme on Tuesday, quoting the speaker of the People’s Assembly, Mohammad Jihad al-Laham, as saying in the assembly’s final session that recent bombings in other countries had vindicated the government.
“Terrorism targeting Syria is expanding and beginning to affect Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, Iraq and, most recently, the Russian city of Volgograd, which confirms Syria’s warning about the need to confront terrorism,” the official news agency Sana quoted Mr. Laham as saying.
On its Facebook page, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights provided a detailed tally of casualties since the first reported death in the conflict, which began in March 2011 with the violent suppression of a protest against Mr. Assad in the southern city of Dara’a. As of Monday, the group said, the deaths totaled 130,433, including 46,266 civilians. Among the civilians, 7,014 were children and 4,695 women.
The deaths also included 32,013 government soldiers, 19,729 pro-government militia members and informers, 19,937 rebel fighters, 2,233 military defectors and 6,913 jihadists fighting on the rebel side, mostly non-Syrians from extremist groups.

Rick Gladstone contributed reporting from New York, and Nick Cumming-Bruce from Geneva.