Syria death toll rises as weather improves
The end of a recent spate of bad weather in Syria has coincided with the return of intensive regime airstrikes, as daily death tolls in the war-ravaged country returned to the 100-plus mark, The Daily Star reported.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said regime forces carried out 211 airstrikes between mid-Tuesday and mid-Wednesday. They included Tuesday’s barrel bomb attack on a livestock market in Hassakeh province, which the Observatory said killed 43 civilians and wounded over 150 others, revising upward an earlier toll.
Eighty-eight of the attacks were carried out by warplanes and more than 123 were barrel bombs dropped by helicopter, the Observatory added.
The Syrian Revolution General Commission and the Local Coordination Committees, networks of anti-regime activists, said 79 and 77 people, respectively, were killed in the Hassakeh attack.
All three groups reported dozens of wounded, with a number of people undergoing amputations.
The LCC reported over 100 civilian deaths Tuesday, after several days earlier in the month when the daily civilian fatality figure ranged between 10 and 20, as poor weather conditions limited the number of airstrikes. The Observatory gave a figure of 80 deaths and more than 300 wounded in the 24-hour period between mid-Tuesday and mid-Wednesday.
Regime airstrikes Wednesday killed 13 civilians in the village of Houla in Homs province, activists said, while the Observatory said at least nine people were killed.
The Observatory added that an airstrike targeting the town of Tal Rifaat in Aleppo province killed five people and wounded 13, while several airstrikes targeting the Damascus suburb of Douma killed two adults and two children.
Airstrikes were also reported in Idlib, Hama and Deraa provinces.
In the city of Homs, a car bomb in the loyalist neighborhood of Akrama killed 10 people, four of them university students, the Observatory said, while state news agency SANA reported five victims and several dozen wounded.
No one claimed responsibility for the blast.
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