Car bombarding bangs Damascus suburb as new United Nations envoy tells resolving the state of war is a “nearly impossible” task.
Fighter jets have bombarded a town in northern Syria, shooting down at least eighteen people, activists tell, while the new United Nations envoy to the country has admitted that brokering an end to the nation’s civil war will be a “nearly impossible” task.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) and the Local Coordination Committees (LCC), 2 anti-government activist groups, told the air strikes aimed a residential area in the northern town of al-Bab, about 30km from the Turkish borderline.
The SOHR assign the death toll at 19, while the LCCs told that twenty-five people had been shot down.
An unprofessional video displayed men frantically looking for bodies in the rubble of a white construction turned into a pile of debris.
The AFP news agency reported that a separate government airstrike on a home in Aleppo city had killed ten members of a family.
The bodies of the children were set under blankets in the back of a yellow pick-up truck outside the northern city’s primary hospital before a hurried funeral, the correspondent reported.
In Damascus, a car bomb blew up in a conscientiously mixed district on the edge of the city, causing casualties including women and children, state media and confrontation activists told.
Syrian officials and confrontation groups put the death toll in that attack at 5. Officials told that twenty-three people had been injured, and the state SANA news agency reported that women and children were among those hurt.
The LCC, which is a network of activists within the country, told ambulances were ferrying injured people from the scene in the Jaramanah neighbourhood.
Last week, at least twelve people were shot down by another car bomb in the same area which aimed a funeral for 2 men who had earlier been killed by rebels. Confrontation activists told the 2 men were members of a newly formed state-backed militia.
State media called that bombarding a terrorist act, while confrontation activists told President Bashar al-Assad’s security agents had done it to sow sectarian discord in the district, which is occupied by Sunni Muslims, Christians and Druze.
“The region is a quite scrupulously various sector. Christians and Druze mostly comprise the population there, and it is the kind of bomb blast that if the [Free Syrian Army] did plant it would make it exceedingly unpopular,”.
An FSA colonel blamed the bombing on the government, telling it was executed to undermine the armed opposition.
Elsewhere in Damascus, witnesses told that Syrian army bulldozers had dropped several houses in the western party of the city as a form of collective punishment aiming people’s property in several areas hostile to President Assad.
“They began 3 hours ago. The bulldozers are bringing down shops and houses. The inhabitants are in the streets,” said a woman who lives in a high-rise building overlooking the Tawahin district.
Anti-government groups also reported scattered violence in regions across the country on Monday, including the capital’s suburbs, the region of Deir el-Zour in the east, Deraa in the south and Idlib and Aleppo in the north.
“This is an unprovoked act of collective punishment. The rebels had left, there are no longer even demonstrations in the area,” said Mouaz al-Shami, a campaigner collecting video documentation of the demolitions.
