Russians killing more civilians than militants, group says
The four- year- old Syrian girl was ending her first trip to her grandparents’ house. Posing for the last family photos before returning to Turkey with her mother, Raghad dressed up in a pretty blue andwhite polka- dot dress and put her hair up in ponytails with red barrettes.
About an hour later, the family heard Russian warplanes overhead and the missiles struck. Raghad, her grandfather and another relative were killed.
The girl is among dozens of civilians who activists say have been killed in the Russian air campaign in Syria, which Moscow says is aimed at crushing ISIL and other Islamic militant groups.
But the month- old Russian bombardment has killed more civilians than it has ISIL militants, according to the main activist group tracking the conflict, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Despite Russian boasts to be going after the extremists more ferociously than Americans have, the Observatory’s figures also suggest the air campaign waged by a U. S.- led coalition the past 13 months has killed ISIL members at a higher rate while harming civilians less.
The Observatory said it has so far confirmed 185 civilians killed in Russian strikes the past month — including 46 women and 48 children — while the toll among ISIL fighters was 131. The heaviest toll came among Syrian rebels not connected to ISIL, with 279 dead, the group said. In contrast, the U. S.- led air campaign has killed 3,726 ISIL members — an average of 252 a month — and 225 civilians, according to the Observatory’s statistics.
The Russians have flatly dismissed all claims of civilian casualties or damage, saying they use various intelligence sources to plan each strike to make sure there is no collateral damage.
Activists say most Russian strikes have targeted Syrian rebels not connected to ISIL, including U. S.- backed factions, with the aim of tipping the civil war in favour of Moscow’s ally, Syrian President Bashar Assad. For example, Raghad’s grandfather, Col. Abdul-Razzaq Khanfoura, was a defector from the Syrian military who until recently was a senior commander in the western- backed Free Syrian Army, though it is not known if he was the target of the Oct. 1 airstrike in the village of Habeet in the rebelheld province of Idlib.
When the Khanfoura family heard the Russian warplanes overhead, Abdul- Razzaq’s wife Zahra scooped up her granddaughter Raghad and rushed to a shelter in the house’s garden. Just as she handed the girl to a cousin in the shelter, the missiles hit the house.
“The explosion was above me,” the 48- year- old Zahra told The Associated Press as she lay in a hospital bed in this southern Turkish city, where she is being treated for the extensive burns from the blast. “After that I have no idea what happened.”
Civilians in the areas that have borne the brunt of the air campaign, like the northwestern and central provinces of Idlib, Hama and Homs, have taken a heavy toll, activists and rebel commanders say.
Assad’s forces have launched ground offensives against rebels, trying to benefit from Russian air support. The combination of strikes and the offensives has fuelled a surge of 120,000 Syrians who fled their homes in October, according the UN figures.
The Observatory gathers its figures through activists on the ground who confirm identities of the dead with relatives and officials. Witnesses can usually distinguish Russian airstrikes from those by the Syrian air force because the latter’s strikes are relatively crude and have lower technology. Russian warplanes often move in large squadrons that people on the ground can see, and strike from higher in the sky with more powerful ordnance.
The activist groups also check reports against Russian daily announcements of the areas targeted.
The Syrian National Coalition, the main western- backed Syrian opposition group, said Russian attacks “amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity” and should be condemned by the UN Security Council.
In Habeet, Raghad and her mother had come to visit from Turkey, where they have lived since late 2011, soon after Raghad’s birth. It was the young girl’s first trip back into Syria.
Her grandfather, Abdul- Razzaq, defected from the military in 2012 and founded the Ahbab al- Mustafa Brigade, one of the early factions that made up the Free Syrian Army. But earlier this year, he stopped rebel activities to stay at home.
In the chaos after the nighttime bombing, Abdul- Razzaq’s son Ward ran to the top floor and found his father, bleeding from a shrapnel wound in his stomach. Ward carried him to a car that rushed him to a nearby clinic. AbdulRazzaq died two hours later.
Ward then made his way to the shelter in the garden, which he found buried under debris. He dug and found Raghad. She was dead. A nephew of Abdul- Razzaq, Ahmed Khanfoura, 19, lay dead beneath her. Raghad’s mother was in another part of the house when the missile struck and was unharmed.
Ward heard his mother Zahra screaming in pain. She was caught under a fence that fell on her. Ward got her to a clinic, and the next day she was taken across the border into Turkey and to a specialized burn hospital in Kadirli.
Four weeks later, Zahra still doesn’t know that her husband and granddaughter are dead.