'Russian raids' kill 23 civilians
Russian air strikes pounded an al-Qaeda-held city in northwestern Syria overnight, killing 23 civilians, a monitoring group said yesterday, but Moscow denied it was responsible.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said dozens of civilians were also wounded in the raids on Idlib, a provincial capital held by al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Nusra Front and its allies since March last year.
But the Russian defence ministry denied its aircraft had carried out any strikes on the city. "Russian aviation did not carry out any military operations, still less air strikes, in Idlib province," military spokesman Igor Konashenkov said in a statement.
Al-Nusra is not party to a Russian- and US-brokered ceasefire that went into force on February 27 between Moscow-backed government forces and Washington-backed non-jihadist rebels.
"The air strikes are the most intensive on Idlib since the beginning of the truce," Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP. "Even though Idlib is not covered by the truce, it had been relatively calm with only intermittent raids," he added.
The Observatory said five children were among those killed in the strikes, which hit several residential areas and near a hospital and a public garden.
Meanwhile, US-backed Kurdish-led fighters have seized ground from the Islamic State group in Syria, the monitor said yesterday, as the jihadists come under attack in their Fallujah bastion in neighbouring Iraq.
The Syrian Democratic Forces, who control a swathe of territory along the Turkish border, launched a push south towards the IS stronghold of Raqa last week, capturing a string of villages in the north of Raqa province.
"The SDF has captured 12 villages... northwest of Raqa in the past 36 hours," Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.
Abdel Rahman said that the villages lie 80 kilometres or more from Raqa itself but that the jihadists' de facto Syria capital was not the immediate goal.
Comments