Crisis In Idlib: Russia And Syria Step Up Airstrikes Against Civilians

On Monday Syrian and Russian bombing campaign against civilian sites in the rebel-held province intensified on a marketplace in northern Syria, more than 33 people were killed and more than 100 wounded by an airstrike.

Syrian and Russian forces also destroyed across two residential blocks in the centre of Maarat al-Numan, while many people reportedly still buried under an apartment building as night fell.

The past four months in 2019 have taken an especially brutal toll across much of the province with the Russian-led bombing decimating civilian infrastructure. Rescue efforts were frequently stopped as jets circled the town in the south of Idlib province, the last corner of the country to remain in opposition hands.

At least two dozen hospitals and medical clinics have been destroyed, market places, schools and centers for the displaced have been systematically targeted in towns and cities they said this places with the opposition hands. UN agencies and NGOs say, the regime hit multiple times until treating patients became impossible.

Now more than 3 million people are now crammed into Idlib province, many of them having fled fighting elsewhere in the country. Syrian regime an air campaign, launched on 29 April, was supposed to have been in support of a ground war in southern Idlib. Moreover, since the offensive began, regime forces have made little progress, even with total air superiority.

During the past five years, the fate of Idlib is central to the outcome of the war, which had killed more than 500,000 people when monitoring groups stopped counting three years ago.

Since then, a fight that started as a push to oust Assad has morphed into multiple conflicts, led to the displacement of more than half the country’s population, who now have nowhere left to run, and drawn in neighbouring and regional states, but now no one want ant Syrian citizens.

Last year in 2018, the Syrian government, supported by Russia and Iran, recaptured areas in Eastern Ghouta in Damascus countryside and Daraa governorate, the regimes used a combination of unlawful tactics, including prohibited weapons, indiscriminate strikes, and restrictions on humanitarian aid, to force anti-government groups to surrender in these areas.

In areas re-taken from the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), the high toll of the war in civilian casualties and damaged infrastructure became clearer. Landmines planted by ISIS before fleeing continued to kill and maim civilians.

In the end we must think who will protect these people.

*Miral Sabry Al Ashry , Associate Professor at Future University (FUE), Political Mass Media Department