At Least 71 People Killed in Government Barrel Bomb Attacks in Aleppo
At least 71 people, most of them civilians, were killed in Syria’s Aleppo province by barrel bombs dropped from government helicopters on Saturday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reports.
In the worst carnage, 59 civilians, all male, were killed at a market in the jihadist-controlled town of al-Bab, Observatory director Rami Abdulrahman told AFP.
“People often gather on Saturday mornings at the al-Hail market in al-Bab, which is why the number of dead was so high,” explained Abdulrahman.
He added that another 12 people were killed in barrel bomb attacks on Aleppo’s rebel-held al-Shaar neighborhood.
The U.N. Envoy to Syria condemned the strikes on civilians as “completely unacceptable,” while the Observatory called it one of the worst massacres perpetrated by the government so far this year.
“All evidence shows that the overwhelming majority of the civilian victims in the Syrian conflict have been caused by the use of such indiscriminate aerial weapons,” U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura said.
“[It is] totally unacceptable that the Syrian air force attacks its own territory in an indiscriminate way, killing its own citizens.”
“The use of barrel bombs must stop.”
The use of barrel bombs, containers packed with explosives and projectiles that are dropped from helicopters, has been widely documented by international human-rights organizations.
In February, Human Rights Watch group accused Syria of dropping barrel bombs on hundreds of sites in 2014, violating the UN Security resolution condemning their use.
In an interview with the BBC the same month, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad denied accusations that his forces had used barrel bombs, insisting that the army uses bullets, missiles and bombs. “There are no barrel bombs; we don’t have barrels,” he said.
ISIS Blows Up Notorious Tadmur Prison in Palmyra
The Islamic State reportedly blew up the Tadmur prison near Palmyra, destroying an important symbol of government control in the ancient city seized by the militants in May, the BBC reports.
“The prison was for decades a symbol of state oppression in Syria. It had held thousands of political prisoners, who faced years of torture and disease in its cells. Many were executed,” the BBC writes.
The prison was empty of people at the time of the detonation, said the Rami Abdulrahman from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
“Detailed information about inmates and conditions inside the high security prison is rare. A 2001 Amnesty International report, based on the accounts of former inmates, described the prison as ‘designed to inflict the maximum suffering, humiliation and fear on prisoners,’” Reuters reports.
The Islamic State is not reported to have harmed the city’s ancient ruins but the Observatory said last week that Islamic State had, however, executed around 20 men in the city’s ancient amphitheater, accusing them of being pro-government.
The militants seized the town of Soran Azaz and two nearby villages after battling fighters from a northern rebel alliance, which was formed last December and includes both Western-backed rebels and Islamist fighters.
The Islamic State will now be able to move along a road that leads north to the Bab al-Salam crossing between the Syrian province of Aleppo and the Turkish province of Kilis, the Observatory said.
Elsewhere, Kurdish militia in Syria backed by U.S.-led strikes captured a dozen villages from ISIS either side of the militants’ de facto capital of Raqqa on Sunday.
“Kurdish units and their allies advanced and took control of at least eight villages southeast of Kobani, amid airstrikes by the international coalition,” the Observatory said.
The Kurds, assisted by U.S.-led strikes and Iraqi Peshmerga forces, were able to oust the militant group from Kobani, which lies in northern Aleppo province on the Turkish-Syrian border, in late January.
Since then, Kurdish YPG forces have moved closer to ISIS’ de facto capital of Raqqa and have been battling the militants in Hassakeh, a strategic province next to Islamic State-held territory in Iraq.
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