According to a war monitor, Russian air strikes on Syria’s northwest killed at least 11 people, including seven civilians, in revenge for fatal drone assaults alleged on rebel forces.
“Six civilians were killed in Jisr al-Shughur and three rebel fighters were killed nearby by Russian air strikes,” Rami Abdel Rahman, who heads the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told AFP.
The strikes killed nine people, according to Ahmed Yezidi of the civil defense in Jisr al-Shughur, a city in rebel-held Idlib province, without clarifying whether combatants were included.
The Russian strike targeted a fruit and vegetable market in the city, according to the Observatory and an AFP correspondent on the ground.
Yezidi called it “a direct attack on the popular market, which is a basic source of income for farmers” in the area.
According to Abdel Rahman, whose Britain-based monitor has a large network of contacts inside war-torn Syria, one civilian and one rebel fighter were also killed in a hit on the outskirts of Idlib city.
He said at least 30 civilians were injured in Sunday’s strikes, and that the death toll was sure to grow.
According to Abdel Rahman, Russian soldiers, which assist Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s administration, were responding to rebel drone strikes over the past week that killed four people, including two children.
Damascus has reclaimed much of the terrain lost in the early phases of Syria’s conflict, which erupted in 2011 when the government ruthlessly crushed pro-democracy protesters.
Large swaths of Idlib province, as well as parts of neighboring Aleppo, Hama, and Latakia provinces, form the last bastion of armed opposition to the regime.
The largest group in the area is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which is led by ex-members of Syria’s previous Al-Qaeda affiliate, but other rebel factions are also active, with varied degrees of Turkish support.
Syria’s war has killed over 500,000 people and displaced over half of the country’s pre-war population.
