U.N. panel alleges war crimes in battle for Aleppo
GENEVA — The Syrian air force deliberately bombed a U.N. humanitarian aid convoy in September in a “meticulously planned” attack that amounted to a war crime, U.N. investigators said Wednesday in a report detailing a range of war crimes on both sides.
The attack on the convoy, which killed 14 aid workers and stoked international outrage, was “one of the most egregious” in a five-month government offensive to take full control of Aleppo, a major Syrian city, the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Syria said in the report, which it plans to present this month to the Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Government aircraft carried out repeated attacks with barrel bombs laced with chlorine gas in the five months covered by the report, from July 21 to Dec. 22, violating an international ban on chemical weapons, the commission said.
For months, Syrian and Russian air forces relentlessly bombarded eastern Aleppo as part of a strategy to force surrender, said the commission’s chairman, Paulo Pinheiro. He added: “The deliberate targeting of civilians has resulted in the immense loss of human life, including hundreds of children.”
Armed opposition groups also committed war crimes by indiscriminately shelling residential areas of governmentheld Aleppo with inaccurate, improvised mortars, killing dozens of civilians, including women and children, the report said, adding that the rebels had also committed abuses against civilians in the areas they controlled.
Russian aircraft joined the Syrians in conducting almost daily air strikes over the five months in an indiscriminate bombing campaign that killed hundreds of civilians, and repeatedly targeted hospitals, water stations, markets and bakeries, suggesting “a willful disregard” for the international laws of war, the commission said.
But the panel’s researchers found no information to support suggestions that Russian forces engaged in war crimes detailed in the report.
The commission’s report, its 13th on the conflict and one of the most hard-hitting, followed a directive by the Human Rights Council in October to identify those responsible for abuses in the battle for Aleppo and to speed the process of bringing perpetrators of war crimes to justice.