Syrian government warplanes carried out airstrikes on a rebellious neighborhood in the capital and a village in the country’s northeast on Sunday, killing at least 25 people, including a dozen children, activists said.
With its ground forces stretched thin, President Bashar Assad’s regime has relied heavily on its fighter jets and helicopters to try to stem rebel advances in the country’s civil war. The air raids frequently hit civilian areas, drawing criticism from the international community.
A Human Rights Watch report last week accused the Syrian government of committing war crimes by using indiscriminate and sometimes deliberate airstrikes against civilians, killing at least 4,300 people since the summer.
On Sunday, a government jet bombed rebel-held areas in the predominantly Kurdish village of Hadad in the northeastern province of Hassaka, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. It said at least 16 people were killed, including two women and three children.
A Hassaka-based activist who was in Hadad when the plane struck said the bombs sent huge plumes of black smoke billowing over the town. He spoke on condition that he be identified only by his nickname of Abu Qasem — by which he is widely known among his comrades — out of fear of reprisals.
Another airstrike on the Damascus neighborhood of Qaboun killed at least nine children, the Observatory said.
The government frequently targets Qaboun, where rebels pushed into early this year. The district has been ravaged by heavy street clashes and shelling since then as the military tries to expel the anti-Assad fighters.
The SANA state news agency said “terrorists” fired mortar rounds that struck a bus station in the Damascus suburb of Jaramana, killing four people and wounding 20. The Syrian regime describes those trying to topple Assad as “terrorists.”
SANA said the attack caused significant damage to cars and buses parked at the station.
The Observatory, which relies on a network of activists on the ground, also reported that four civilians died after being tortured in a jail in the town of Zakyeh. It did not provide any further details.
In Idlib province in northwestern Syria, regime troops on Sunday reached the embattled military bases of Hamadiya and Wadi Deif near the city of Maaret al-Numan, Observatory director Rami Abdul-Rahman said.
The government forces killed more than 20 rebels in an ambush in the area on Saturday, opening the way for supplies to reach the facilities. The military had been forced to drop supplies in by helicopter because rebels controlled the area.
On Sunday, two rockets fired from Syria exploded in the Lebanese border village of al-Qasr, killing one person and wounding two, a Lebanese security official said. Two more rockets landed in a nearby village of Hawsh, killing a 13-year-old boy and damaging two homes, the official said.
It’s unclear who fired the rockets from Syria, the official said.
In the northern province of Aleppo, three journalists working for state TV were wounded in a car bombing Sunday, the state news agency said. Correspondent Shadi Helweh and two cameramen, Yehia Mosseli and Ahmed Suleiman, were hospitalized with shrapnel wounds, the agency said.
The journalists were reporting on Syrian soldiers who were trying to stop two suicide attackers attempting to detonate a car bomb near a security headquarters in the province. SANA said the two attackers were killed, and the journalists and several other civilians were wounded.
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