Offensive against rebels intensifies, 28 civilians killed
BEIRUT — Stepped up air strikes by Syrian government forces and their Russian allies on the country’s last remaining rebel strongholds killed at least 28 civilians Monday, activists and monitors said.
Opposition rescue teams pulled babies from incubators in a hospital under attack, rushing them to safety in a pick-up truck. Elsewhere, rescue workers searched for survivors in the rubble of a destroyed apartment building.
“It is like the end of days,” Raed Saleh, head of the firstresponders known as White Helmets, said of the past 24 hours of attacks on the opposition-held eastern Damascus suburb of Ghouta and in northwestern Idlib province.
The escalating offensive, which included a suspected chlorine attack a day earlier, reached a new ferocity after insurgents downed a Russian Su-25 over the weekend, the first time they scored such a major hit against the government’s main ally, Moscow.
Russia has waged a punishing aerial campaign against Syria’s armed opposition since intervening in the civil war on the side of its ally, President Bashar Assad, in 2015. Ceasefire deals have failed to quell the violence or restore humanitarian aid to besieged Ghouta, were 400,000 residents are holed up amid warnings of a looming humanitarian disaster.
“If a Russian plane was downed, revenge should not be on civilians and children,” Saleh said. “Now more than any other day, we need the international community to restore the humanity it has lost in Syria.”
The al Qaeda-linked Levant Liberation Committee, which is the dominant militant group in Idlib, said its fighters shot down the Russian jet near the town of Saraqeb and killed its pilot after he ejected from the plane. Rebels have previously claimed to have downed Syrian government planes or drones, but it was the first time they hit a Russian aircraft.
Russia’s military bases in western Syria were also hit last month in a series of drone attacks, challenging Moscow’s gains in the country still torn by conflict.
Since then, activists say Russian and Syrian government forces have stepped up their attacks.
Activists and rescue workers reported at least 28 civilians, including six children, were killed on Monday in Ghouta, where nearly 40 air strikes hit the suburb that is the last opposition stronghold in Damascus.
In Idlib, two hospitals have been hit with air strikes since Sunday and at least 14 people have been killed.