Russian airstrikes kill ten civilians in Idlib

Monitoring Desk

IDLIB: At least 10 civilians were killed in airstrikes carried out by Russian aircraft in the rural countryside of Syria’s northwestern Idlib province.

According to Mustafa Hajj Youssef, director of the White Helmets civil-defense agency in Idlib, the air raids targeted a hospital and two schools in the village of Meshmishana in Idlib’s Jisr al-Shughour district.

The strikes left 10 civilians dead and another 15 injured, including civil-defense personnel, Youssef told Anadolu Agency.

“Schools in the district have been shut due to ongoing shelling [by the regime], which will likely raise the death toll further,” he said.

Abu Bahr (not his real name), a pro-opposition activist, identified the aircraft that conducted the strikes as a Russian Sukhoi Su-35 fighter, which, he said, had taken off from Russia’s Khmeimim Airbase in western Syria.

On Wednesday, 10 civilians were killed and another 20 injured when Russian fighter jets targeted the town of Maarat al-Numan in Idlib’s southern countryside.

Notably, Idlib falls within a network of de-escalation zones — endorsed by Turkey, Russia and Iran — in which acts of aggression are expressly prohibited.

Controlled largely by anti-regime groups, Idlib has remained the target of intense airstrikes for the last two months. In January alone, 211 civilians were killed in the province while another 1,447 were injured.

Syria has only just begun to emerge from a devastating conflict that began in 2011, when the Assad regime cracked down on demonstrators with unexpected ferocity.

Meanwhile, Russia on Thursday called the “illegal” U.S. presence in Syria a hurdle to the peace process, accusing it of giving shelter to “militants.”

“The U.S. illegal armed presence in Syria remains a serious challenge to the progress towards peace in Syria and the preservation of its unity and territorial integrity,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zaharova told a press conference.

Zaharova claimed that militants use a 55-kilometer zone created unilaterally by the U.S. around their military base in southern Syria near the village of At Tanf to hide from regime forces.

“Militants hide from the persecution of Syrian government forces, regroup there, arming for new attacks in the Syrian desert,” she said.

Turkey has complained of the U.S. forces in Syria supporting and supplying arms to the terrorist PYD/PKK.