Strikes on Afrin and Ghouta pile on Syria’s misery
Air strikes killed dozens of civilians in Eastern Ghouta yesterday and forced thousands more to flee, as Syrian troops pressed their blistering assault on the last rebel stronghold near Damascus.
The latest deaths brought the toll for the nearly month-old offensive to 1,364, in one of the war’s worst crises.
More than 10,000 civilians reached army positions yesterday, state media said.
Syria’s war enters its eighth year with another assault unfolding in the north, where Turkish-led forces pressed an operation to seize the Kurdish-majority region of Afrin.
More than 150,000 people have fled Afrin city in the past few days, a Kurdish official told Reuters. Bombing on Friday killing 43 civilians, a third of them in a strike on a hospital.
On the edge of Ghouta, a semi-rural area within mortar range of central Damascus, thousands of civilians left destroyed towns, carrying their scant belongings.
Governor of rural Damascus, Alaa Ibrahim, said the government was setting up new centres due to the massive crowds.
Syria’s envoy to the UN, Bashar Al Jaafari, said 40,000 people fled Ghouta on Thursday, and the sudden exodus appeared to have caught the government flat-footed.
Long lines formed outside public bathrooms at a government centre on the edge of Eastern Ghouta, and displaced families complained of a lack of water and mattresses. In a state television message, the Syrian Army urged all residents to use “corridors” it had established to leave the enclave, saying it had recaptured 70 per cent of rebel territory.
The ground offensive pressed by Syrian troops and allied militia has splintered Eastern Ghouta into three pockets, each held by a different faction.
Those three Islamist groups said Friday they would be willing to negotiate directly with Russia on a ceasefire for Ghouta, but did not mention talks with the Syrian government.
Their statement came hours after UN special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, said talks were ongoing between Russia and one of the groups, Jaish Al Islam. That negotiations track had already produced six days of calm for Ghouta’s largest town of Douma, he said.
There have been deliveries of food and hundreds of civilians have been bussed out.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitoring group, said air strikes on Zamalka killed 30 people gathering to leave for government lines yesterday. It said at least 96 civilians were killed in Russian and regime air strikes on the south-western Ghouta pocket on Friday.
It says it determines whose planes carry out raids according to type, location, flight patterns and munitions used, but Russia on Friday denied its jets were active in the Ghouta operation. The heaviest of Friday’s raids were on Kafr Batna, where at least 70 civilians died and where the Observatory said incendiary weapons were used.
A reporter for AFP saw eight charred bodies and said the wounded were left in the roads as rescue centres had been put out of service by bombing.
Syrian President Bashar Al Assad has in recent months recovered territory lost at the start of the conflict and Ghouta was one of his key targets.
An exodus was also under way in Afrin. The Observatory said a Turkish strike on Friday hit Afrin’s hospital, killing 16 civilians, two of them pregnant.
“There was bombing on the city during the day that got close to the hospital, but this evening it was directly hit,” Serwan Bery, co-chair of the Kurdish Red Crescent, told AFP.
“It was the only functioning hospital in Afrin city,” he said.
The strike brought to 43 the number of civilians killed in the town on Friday, the Observatory said. Turkey’s military denied hitting the hospital, saying on Twitter that its operation in Afrin “is carried out in such a way as to not cause any harm to civilians”.
The UN said it was worried the forces inside were not allowing civilians to flee, as that would leave them exposed to Turkey’s superior firepower. Ravina Shamdasani, spokesman for the UN’s Rights Office decried “reports that civilians are being prevented from leaving Afrin city by Kurdish forces ... [and] are being held to be used as human shields.”
Turkey denied bombing Afrin’s only operational hospital on Friday, killing 16 civilians, two of them pregnant women