Dozens dead as jet crashes into market
AT least 27 people have been killed and dozens injured after a Syrian army fighter jet crashed into a busy marketplace in the rebel-held northwestern town of Ariha.
Most of the dead were civilians on the ground in the Idlib provincial town that fell to a coalition of Islamist insurgents in May, according to the Britain-based Observatory For Human Rights, which tracks violence across Syria.
S c or e s were also injured, according to the monitor and witnesses.
The military plane had dropped a bomb in the heart of the town’s main commercial street – where shopkeepers open in the early morning – before crashing in the middle of the marketplace, witnesses said.
“The plane had dropped a bomb on the main Bazaar street at low altitude only seconds before it crashed,” said Ghazal Abdullah, a resident who was close to the incident.
The Observatory said the jet was not shot down.
Fighting has intensified of late in rural Idlib province between government forces and an insurgent grouping called Jaish al Fat eh , or Army of Conquest, which includes Syria’s al Qaeda offshoot Nusra Front.
Ariha’s fall had left the insurgents in control of most of Idlib province, which borders Turkey and neighbours Latakia, the heartland of President Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite sect, on the Mediterranean coast.
The army has fought back using heavy air strikes to beat back insurgent advances into the mountains of Latakia.