Russian Warplane Kills Three Civilians

Three civilians were reportedly killed and six others wounded when Russian warplanes struck the outskirts of the northwest Syrian city of Idlib on Saturday.

“Russian air strikes this morning” to the west of the city left “three dead from the same family… and six people wounded”, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, adding rescue teams were still at work removing rubble.

Four strikes hit the area where rebel bases are also present, added the Observatory, a Britain-based group which relies on a network of sources on the ground in Syria.

The Syrian civil war erupted in 2011 when government forces brutally repressed pro-democracy protests, leading to the death of more than half a million people.

With Russian and Iranian support, the government of President Bashar al-Assad has clawed back much of the territory it had lost to rebels early in the conflict.

The last pockets of armed opposition to the Syrian regime include swathes of the northern rebel-held Idlib province, controlled by jihadist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which is headed by the country’s former Al-Qaeda affiliate.

Since 2020, a ceasefire deal brokered by Damascus ally Moscow and rebel-backer Ankara has largely held in Syria’s northwest, despite periodic clashes.

However, late June saw an uptick in violence.

Russian air strikes killed at least 13 people in Idlib province on June 25, in what the Observatory said at the time was the deadliest such attack on the country this year.