Russian military plane crash in Syria kills 39 servicemen

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 Russian Defense Ministry said Tuesday’s crash of the An-26 military cargo plane occurred just 1,600 feet from the runway of Syria’s Hemeimeem military base. It said the plane did not come under fire, adding it would conduct a full investigation.

It 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.

Meanwhile, shelling near the rebel-held eastern suburbs of Damascus killed dozens of people over the past 24 hours as President Bashar Assad’s government, supported by the Russian military, pushed its assault on the capital’s rebel-held suburbs. International aid workers on a rare humanitarian mission inside the besieged area described dramatic scenes of rescuers trying to pull corpses from the rubble of buildings and children who hadn’t seen daylight in 15 days.

The mission on Monday 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 30-day 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 children who watched as aid workers tried to pull corpses from the rubble.

Monday’s aid shipment was the first to enter eastern Ghouta amid weeks of a crippling siege and a government assault that has killed some 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. As a result, 14 of the 46 trucks in the convoy were not able to fully offload critical humanitarian supplies.

Another aid convoy is scheduled to enter eastern Ghouta on Thursday, but Laerke said security measures must be guaranteed for this to happen.

U.N. probes Russia in war crime case

U.N. investigators have linked Russian forces to a possible war crime in Syria for the first time, reporting Tuesday that a Russian plane was responsible for airstrikes on a market last year that killed scores of 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.