UN probe pins Syria airstrike on Russia

All parties ‘completely disregarding the rules of war,’ report finds

GENEVA— United Nations war crimes investigators said Tuesday that a Russian plane was apparently behind an airstrike in November on a Syrian market that killed 84 people, an attack that could amount to a war crime.

The findings, reported by the UN’s Commission of Inquiry on Syria, were the first time the group has pinned responsibility for civilian deaths in Syria directly on Russia.

In the same report, the Commission of Inquiry said the U.S.led coalition in the war against Daesh, also known as ISIS or ISIL, group failed to properly vet the target of a March 20, 2017 air raid that killed150 civil- ians sheltering in a school in northern Syria.

“The international coalition should have known the nature of the target,” the report said, adding that the oversight had put the coalition in violation of humanitarian law. The coalition took responsibility for the strike, saying it had targeted 30 Daesh fighters it believed were hiding in the building.

“All parties share guilt for completely disregarding the rules of war,” said the commission’s chairman, Paulo Pinheiro, at a press conference introducing the report. He said parties were resorting to “increasingly cynical methods” to secure objectives in Syria’s complex civil war.

The report documented widespread abuses of international law, including leveraging aid in combination with siege warfare to force civilians “to surrender or starve.” It said pro-government forces had bombed hospitals and clinics in oppositionheld territory in northwest Syria. According to the report, “all available information” indi- cates that a Russian plane carried out the Nov. 13 airstrike that hit a market near houses and a police station run by Western-backed Syrian rebels in the town of Atarib, in the northern Idlib province.

The commission, which was created 6 1⁄2 years ago to document alleged human rights violations by any side in Syria’s war, says the plane that carried out the airstrike took off from the Hemeimeem air base in Syria, which is run by Russian forces. Russia is a main backer of President Bashar Assad’s forces.

The Russian military says its forces in Syria have only launched strikes on militant targets after verifying their location, and have never hit areas populated by civilians.

Tuesday’s report lays out the investigators’ findings during a six-month probe conducted between July 8 and Jan. 15.