BALADI NEWS
More than 400,000 people have been displaced by air raids in northwestern Syria over the past three months, the U.N. said Friday, as its human rights chief condemned “international indifference” over a mounting civilian death toll.
“Airstrikes kill and maim significant numbers of civilians several times a week, and the response seems to be a collective shrug,” U.N. rights chief Michelle Bachelet said in a statement.
Idlib region is supposed to be protected by a months-old international truce deal, but has faced growing bombardment by the government and its ally Russia since late April.
The spike in violence has killed more than 740 civilians, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Aid groups have described the latest bloody episode of Syria’s eight-year civil war as a “nightmare.”
More than 400,000 people have fled violence in the area since the end of April, said David Swanson of the United Nations’ humanitarian coordination office OCHA.
He spoke to AFP as regime air raids pummelled a market in the Idlib province town of Saraqib, the second attack on the same market this week, according to the Observatory.
The region under attack is home to some three million people, nearly half of them already displaced from other parts of the country.
It covers nearly all of Idlib and parts of neighboring Aleppo, Hama, and Latakia provinces.
Most of the displacement is from southern Idlib and northern Hama, the two areas that have been hit hardest by the flare-up, OCHA said.
Air strikes by the government and its Russian ally killed 12 civilians in the region on Thursday, according to the Observatory.
Another 50 civilians were killed in strikes on Monday alone – the majority on a busy market, the monitor said.
It said that since the end of April it had documented 39 attacks against health facilities or medical workers in the region.
At least 50 schools have been damaged by the air strikes and shelling, it added.
Source: The Globe Post.