Syria plane crash kills Russian troops
U.N. investigators call Russia airstrike that killed civilians a possible war crime
BEIRUT — A Russian military cargo plane crashed near an air base in Syria on Tuesday, killing all 39 Russian servicemen on board in a blow to Russian operations in Syria.
The Russian military quickly insisted the plane was not shot down and blamed the crash on a technical error. The crash of the An-26 military cargo plane occurred just 1,600 feet from the runway of Syria’s Hemeimeem military base. The military said it would conduct a full investigation.
The base near the Mediterranean coast is far from the front lines of the conflict but came under shelling in December. Russian military outposts in the country have also come under rebel attacks recently, including a drone raid earlier this year involving 13 aircraft equipped with satellite navigation.
The An-26 cargo plane was the second Russian military plane to crash in Syria this year, after a Su-25 ground attack jet was struck by a portable air defense missile over northern Idlib province last month.
Elsewhere Tuesday, United Nations investigators said they have linked Russian forces to a possible war crime in Syria for the first time, reporting that a Russian plane was responsible for airstrikes on a market last year that killed civilians.
The plane carried out a series of attacks in November on the town of Al Atarib, west of Aleppo, killing at least 84 people and injuring more than 150, the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Syria said.
The strikes may not have specifically targeted civilians, the panel ruled, but the use of unguided blast bombs in a densely populated area could amount to a war crime on the part of Russia, which has played a crucial role in backing the Syrian government.
The finding formed part of the panel’s 15th report on the conflict in Syria, which also said the Syrian government had used chemical weapons in rebel-held areas of Damascus and that the U.S.-led coalition had inflicted heavy casualties in airstrikes aimed at Islamic State forces.
“All parties share guilt for completely disregarding the rules of war and for failing to adequately protect civilians,” the panel’s chairman, Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, told reporters in Geneva.
The conclusions, based on more than 500 interviews, coincided with reports of heavy civilian casualties in the Damascus suburb of eastern Ghouta, where the Syrian government, backed by Russian forces, pushed on with an offensive aimed at crushing the last major rebel stronghold in the area.
International aid workers on a rare humanitarian mission inside the besieged area described scenes of rescuers trying to pull corpses from the rubble of buildings and children who hadn’t seen daylight in 15 days.
The Monday mission to the area known as eastern Ghouta was cut short after the government shelling escalated while the aid workers were still inside, calling into question future aid shipments to the encircled region, the last major opposition stronghold near the capital.
Opposition activists and a war monitor said 80 people were killed Monday — the deadliest day since the U.N. Security Council demanded a 30day cease-fire for Syria — and at least nine were killed Tuesday.
“People were telling us very desperate stories. They are tired, they are angry. They don’t want aid, what they want is the shelling to stop,” Pawel Krzysiek, head of communications for the Syrian branch of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said Tuesday.
He said thousands of families were huddled in underground shelters, reluctant to eat in front of each other because of the pervasive hunger, and that children were forced to watch as aid workers tried to pull corpses from the rubble.
“No child should be witnessing this in their very early state of development. But the children of Douma and the children of eastern Ghouta unfortunately do, and that’s what makes the situation very, very dramatic,” he said.
Monday’s aid shipment was the first to enter eastern Ghouta after weeks of a crippling siege and a government assault that has killed about 800 civilians since Feb. 18. Aid agencies said Syrian authorities removed basic health supplies, including trauma and surgical kits and insulin, from the convoys before they set off.
The U.N. said airstrikes and shelling in eastern Ghouta continued for hours while the convoy was unloading supplies.
“After nearly nine hours inside, the decision was made to leave for security reasons and to avoid jeopardizing the safety of humanitarian teams on the ground,” said Jens Laerke, deputy spokesman for the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. As a result, 14 of the 46 trucks in the convoy were not able to fully unload critical humanitarian supplies.
Laerke said the team found a desperate situation for people who have endured months without access to humanitarian aid. “Food for civilians was in short supply or prohibitively expensive, and high rates of acute malnutrition were observed,” he said.
The violence called into question future aid deliveries. Another aid convoy is to enter eastern Ghouta on Thursday, but Laerke said security measures must be guaranteed for this to happen.
Pro-government forces have made swift gains since launching their offensive, seizing roughly 40 percent of eastern Ghouta territory in two weeks, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group, and setting off a wave of displacement as civilians flee strikes and advancing forces.
Airstrikes continued Tuesday. The opposition’s Syrian Civil Defense search-and-rescue group reported at least nine people were killed in airstrikes on the town of Jisreen. The group, also known as the White Helmets, said two of its volunteers and 28 others suffered difficulties breathing after shelling on the town of Hammouriyeh on Monday evening.
Information for this article was contributed by Zeina Karam, Nataliya Vasilyeva, Philip Issa and Bassem Mroue of The Associated Press; and by Nick Cumming-Bruce of The New York Times.