Anger of regime’s victims raises cost of freeing captured fighter pilots
The capture of a Syrian pilot whose warplane was shot down while bombing a rebel town was a rare setback for the widely condemned Russian and Iranbacked offensive in Idlib.
The Al Qaeda-linked Hayat Tahrir Al Sham group said on Wednesday it had captured the Sukhoi-22 pilot near Khan Sheikhoun in northern Idlib, the last major rebel stronghold.
The regime’s ruthless bombing of the town will raise the price of recovering the pilot, or make it prohibitive, opposition sources said.
A Syrian rebel officer said fighters had captured at least 15 regime pilots since the Syrian uprising turned into a full-scale armed rebellion in 2012-2013, after a crackdown on protests against President Bashar Al Assad.
Of the 15, five were either exchanged or handed back to the regime under pressure from Turkey, which was acting under Russian pressure. The remaining 10 pilots have not been heard from.
The UN blamed the regime for a sarin gas attack on Khan Sheikhoun in April 2017 that killed dozens of civilians.
In the 24 hours before that attack, warplanes bombed at least three hospitals in the town and near by to deny treatment to the victims, according to the Syrian American Medical Society. The attack on Khan Sheikhoun was one of at least 33 chemical weapons attacks blamed on the regime by the Commission of Inquiry on Syria, set up by the UN Human Rights Commissioner. The Commission identified another six chemical weapon
attacks in Syria since 2013 but their perpetrators could not be determined.
The rebel officer said that after the latest pilot capture, Russia told the opposition that it was holding Syrian rebels alive, raising the possibility of an exchange.
Early in August, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres announced a special investigation into the bombing of hospitals and schools in Idlib by the regime and its Russian backers, who said the buildings contained terrorists. The UN move prompted a brief halt in the bombing.
Another Syrian opposition source said many of the regime’s pilots could still be alive, having mostly been captured by militant rebel factions.
He said these militants were more pragmatic than ISIS, which burnt alive a Jordanian pilot in January 2015, months after he was captured in Deir Ezzor.
“They are not afraid of doing something similar to ISIS but they realise it would be counterproductive,” he said.
The source attributed the few prisoner exchanges taking place to the fact many of the pilots belong to Mr Al Assad’s minority Alawite sect, which raises their ransom fee.
An Idlib physician who lost his seven children in a 2017 air raid said he wanted to exact his own version of justice.
Mahmoud Al Sayeh survived the raid that destroyed the apartment building he lived in with his family, but 29 residents of the building were killed. Among them were his children, his brother and his brother’s six-member family.
“Hand me the pilot. I will torch him, and bear all religious and temporal responsibility,” Dr Al Sayeh tweeted, posting a photo of his five daughters and two sons, all under 10.