Russian airstrikes in Syria kill more civilians than militants
The four-year-old Syrian girl was ending her first trip to her grandparents’ house. Posing for the last family photos before returning to Turkey with her mother, Raghad dressed up in a pretty blueand-white polka-dot dress and put her hair up in ponytails with red barrettes.
About an hour later, the family heard Russian warplanes overhead and the missiles struck. Raghad, her grandfather and another relative were killed.
The girl is among dozens of civilians who activists say have been killed in the Russian air campaign in Syria, which Moscow says is aimed at crushing ISIL and other Islamic militant groups.
But the month-old Russian bombardment has killed more civilians than it has ISIL militants, according to the main activist group tracking the conflict, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Despite Russian boasts to be going after the extremists more ferociously than Americans have, the Observatory’s figures also suggest the air campaign waged by a U.S.led coalition the past 13 months has killed ISIL members at a higher rate while harming civilians less.
The Observatory said it has so far confirmed 185 civilians killed in Russian strikes the past month — including 46 women and 48 children — while the toll among ISIL fighters was 131. The heaviest toll came among Syrian rebels not connected to ISIL, with 279 dead, the group said. In contrast, the U.S.-led air campaign has killed 3,726 ISIL members — an average of 252 a month — and 225 civilians, according to the Observatory’s statistics.
The Russians have flatly dismissed all claims of civilian casualties or damage, saying they use various intelligence sources to plan each strike to make sure there is no collateral damage.
Activists say most Russian strikes have targeted Syrian rebels not connected to ISIL, including U.S.-backed factions, with the aim of tipping the civil war in favour of Moscow’s ally, Syrian President Bashar Assad. For example, Raghad’s grandfather, Col. AbdulRazzaq Khanfoura, was a defector from the Syrian military who until recently was a senior commander in the western-backed Free Syrian Army, though it is not known if he was the target of the Oct. 1 airstrike in the village of Habeet in the rebelheld province of Idlib.
When the Khanfoura family heard the Russian warplanes overhead, Abdul-Razzaq’s wife Zahra scooped up her granddaughter Raghad and rushed to a shelter in the house’s garden. Just as she handed the girl to a cousin in the shelter, the missiles hit the house.
“The explosion was above me,” the 48-year-old Zahra told The Associated Press as she lay in a hospital bed in this southern Turkish city, where she is being treated for the extensive burns from the blast. “After that I have no idea what happened.”
Civilians in the areas that have borne the brunt of the air campaign, like the northwestern and central provinces of Idlib, Hama and Homs, have taken a heavy toll, activists and rebel commanders say. Assad’s forces have launched ground offensives against rebels, trying to benefit from Russian air support. The combination of strikes and the offensives has fuelled a surge of 120,000 Syrians who fled their homes in October, according the UN figures.
The Observatory gathers its figures through activists on the ground who confirm identities of the dead with relatives and officials. Witnesses can usually distinguish Russian airstrikes from those by the Syrian air force because the latter’s strikes are relatively crude and have lower technology. Russian warplanes often move in large squadrons that people on the ground can see and strike from higher in the sky with more powerful ordnance. The activist groups also check reports against Russian daily announcements of the areas targeted.
The Syrian National Coalition, the main western-backed Syrian opposition group, said Russian attacks “amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity” and should be condemned by the UN Security Council.
In Habeet, Raghad and her mother had come to visit from Turkey, where they have lived since late 2011, soon after Raghad’s birth. It was the young girl’s first trip back into Syria. Her grandfather, Abdul-Razzaq, defected from the military in 2012 and founded the Ahbab al-Mustafa Brigade, one of the early factions that made up the Free Syrian Army. But earlier this year, he stopped rebel activities to stay at home.
In the chaos after the nighttime bombing, Abdul-Razzaq’s son Ward ran to the top floor and found his father, bleeding from a shrapnel wound in his stomach. Ward carried his father to a car that rushed him to a nearby clinic. Abdul-Razzaq died two hours later.
Ward then made his way to the shelter in the garden, which he found buried under debris. He dug frantically and found Raghad, face down. She was dead. A nephew of Abdul-Razzaq, 19-year-old Ahmed Khanfoura, lay dead beneath her. Raghad’s mother was in another part of the house when the missile struck and survived unharmed.
Ward heard his mother Zahra screaming in pain. She was caught under a fence that fell on her. Ward got her to a clinic, and the next day she was taken across the border into Turkey and to a specialized burn hospital in Kadirli.
Four weeks later, Zahra still doesn’t know that her husband and granddaughter are dead. Every time Ward visits her, she asks why Abdul-Razzaq hasn’t called or come to see her. Ward tells her his father hasn’t been able to cross to Turkey and the phones aren’t working,
When she asks him to send him a message saying hello, Ward acts as if he’s writing a message on his smart phone and tells her he sent it.
U.S. satellite imagery detected heat around a Russian passenger jet just before it went down in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, two U.S. officials said Tuesday. But the discovery doesn’t resolve the mystery of why the plane crashed, killing all 224 aboard.
A missile striking the Metrojet Airbus A321-200 was ruled out because neither a launch nor an engine burn had been detected, one of the officials said.
The infrared activity that was detected could mean many things, including a bomb blast or that an engine on the plane exploded due to a malfunction.
Aviation analyst Paul Beaver said the heat picked up by the satellite “indicates that there was a catastrophic explosion or disintegration of the airplane,” but doesn’t reveal the cause.
“It doesn’t tell us if it was a bomb … or if somebody had a fight in the airplane with a gun — there is a whole raft of things that could happen in this regard,” he said.
It also could indicate a fuel tank or engine exploding, although “engines are designed so that if something malfunctions or breaks off, it is contained within the engine,” Beaver added.
Some aviation experts had earlier suggested a bomb was the most likely cause of Saturday’s crash, while some others pointed at a 2001 incident in which the jet damaged its tail during landing.
The Metrojet was flying from Egypt’s Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh to St. Petersburg when it crashed in the Sinai Peninsula after breaking up at high altitude, Russian aviation officials said.
Islamic State militants said they had “brought down” the Russian plane because of Moscow’s recent military intervention in Syria against the extremist group. But the group did not provide any evidence to support its claim, and militants in northern Sinai have not shot down any commercial airliners or fighter jets.
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi called that claim “propaganda” aimed at damaging the country’s image, and he insisted the security situation in the Sinai Peninsula is under “full control.”
In an interview with the BBC, elSissi also reiterated that the cause of the crash may not be known for months and said there should be no speculation about it.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Russia will keep fighting terrorism in Syria and elsewhere, adding that no one will succeed in scaring it.
Alexander Agafonov, head of the Russian rescue mission in Egypt, said in a televised conference with other officials that searchers found no more bodies Tuesday after combing an area of 28 square kilometres. Emergency Situations Minister Vladimir Puchkov said the site “should be studied centimetre by centimetre.”
“If you need to sift through the sand where the remains or pieces of the fuselage could be, do it,” he said.