Suspected Russian strikes kill 38 civilians in northwest Syria: monitor

Agencies

June 8, 2018

Beirut, Jun 8: Air strikes thought to have been carried out by Russian jets on a rebel-held residential area in northwestern Syrian have killed 38 civilians, a Britain-based monitor said Friday.

Five children were among those killed when the strikes hit the area of Zardana in the northwestern Idlib province late Thursday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said.

Zardana is largely controlled by Islamist rebels, with a small presence of the Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham alliance led by Syria’s former Al-Qaeda affiliate.

An AFP correspondent at the scene saw volunteers and a crane continue to search the rubble for bodies in the early morning.

Half a dozen men in civilian clothes helped carry a person in a black body bag away from the site of the strikes, which pulverised several buildings.

At night, dozens of wounded streamed in to the local hospital, including women, children, the elderly and rescue volunteers, the correspondent said.

The twisted bodies of the deceased lay covered in a fine light grey dust and dashed with bright red blood amid the rubble.

The Russian defence ministry said Friday that Russia did not carry out air strikes in Idlib province on Thursday, according to Russian agencies.

Most of Idlib province lies beyond government control and is held by an array of rebels and militants.

Since Russia intervened on its side in 2015, the Syrian regime has regained control of around half of the country.

More than 350,000 people have been killed in Syria’s war since it started in 2011 with the brutal repression of anti-government protests.

The Observatory says it relies on sources inside Syria for its information, and determines who carried out strikes according to flight patterns, as well as planes and ammunition involved.

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Israeli forces invade southwestern Syria, set up checkpoint in Quneitra

News Network

November 24,2025

Israeli forces have pushed over the Syrian frontier, erecting a checkpoint and stopping vehicles in the southwestern city of Quneitra, in yet another breach of the Arab country’s sovereignty.

The violation took place on Sunday, when the troops made their way across the border, setting up the outpost near the Ain al-Bayda junction in northern Quneitra, Syrian outlets reported.

According to the al-Ikhbariya paper, an Israeli detachment positioned itself at the junction, halting cars and conducting searches.

The Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) reported that three Israeli military vehicles then moved further into the northern countryside, deploying between the town of Jubata al-Khashab and the villages of Ofaniya and Ain al-Bayda. The agency added that a separate Israeli unit mounted a new incursion in the central region, approaching the villages of Umm Batina and al-Ajraf.

Residents said such activities have surged in recent months, pointing to Israeli advances onto farmland, leveling of extensive forested areas, arrests, and spread of mobile checkpoints.

The Israeli regime began markedly increasing its military aggression against Syria last year.

The escalation coincided with increasingly ferocious onslaughts throughout the country by the so-called Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) Takfiri terrorist group, which the government of President Bashar al-Assad had confined to northwestern Syria. The HTS, however, managed to overthrow the government as the Israeli attacks would pummel the country’s civilian and defensive infrastructure.

Various reports have shown that, during the escalation, the regime conducted more than 1,000 airstrikes on the Syrian territory and over 400 ground raids into the south.

Following the collapse of the Assad government, Tel Aviv also widened its grip over the occupied Golan Heights by taking control of a demilitarized buffer zone, in defiance of a 1974 Disengagement Agreement. Earlier this month, senior Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, visited the buffer zone, prompting expressions of alarm on the part of the United Nations.

The United States, the regime’s biggest ally, has, meanwhile, been fraternizing the HTS head Abu Mohammed al-Jolani amid the widely reported prospect of rapprochement with Tel Aviv.

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