Airstrikes in east Syria kill 12 civilians, says monitor
Regime holding 400,000 people under siege in Eastern Ghouta
BEIRUT: Airstrikes on one of the last villages still held by Daesh in eastern Syria killed 12 civilians, including four children, a monitor said Monday.
The strikes were carried out late Sunday on the village of Susa in Deir Ezzor province, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said.
“Twelve civilians from a same family, including four children, were killed,” SOHR head Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.
The Britain-based monitoring organization, which has a broad network of sources on the ground, said the strikes were likely conducted by the US-led coalition that launched air raids against Daesh in Syria and Iraq in 2014.
There was no immediate comment from the coalition.
Daesh has lost nearly all the territory it once held in Iraq and Syria and is clinging to a scattering of small villages and pockets of land in the border area.
The coalition admitted on Thursday to “unintentionally” killing at least 817 civilians since it started its aerial campaign against Daesh.
Meanwhile, regime forces battled with opposition fighters and Al-Qaeda militants on two fronts on Sunday as the country prepared to close out another violent year since the country descended into civil war in 2011.
Militants supported by an Al-Qaeda-linked cell renewed their assault against regime forces that have been holding a vast pocket of the Damascus suburbs under siege, said the SOHR. A second front between many of the same groups saw fresh fighting in northwest Syria, along the border between Idlib and Hama provinces, according to the SOHR.
The fighting outside Damascus was concentrated around the contested town of Harasta and a nearby military installation. The insurgents flanked the installation on Sunday, trapping an unknown number of regime forces inside, reported the SOHR. The local, activistrun Ghouta Media Center reported fierce clashes and dense government airstrikes.
Twenty-one soldiers and 26 opposition fighters were killed in two days of clashes, according to Abdel Rahman.
Opposition fighters first attacked the installation seven weeks ago. The regime responded with waves of indiscriminate airstrikes and artillery attacks that killed more than 250 civilians in what are called the Eastern Ghouta suburbs of Damascus, which are still under opposition control.
The Syrian Civil Defense search-and-rescue group, also known as the White Helmets, said shelling and rocket fire killed 19 people in Eastern Ghouta on Saturday, one day after medical evacuations were completed to save the lives of 29 others. The Red Cross and Red Crescent took three days to evacuate 29 patients from the besieged suburbs to receive urgent medical care at hospitals in Damascus.
The UN says regime forces are holding 400,000 people under siege in Eastern Ghouta. The region was once a hotbed of protest against regime leader Bashar Assad. The subsequent crackdown on demonstrations in Ghouta and other parts of the country in 2011 sparked the ongoing civil war that has killed more than 400,000 people and displaced half of Syria’s population.