A number of civilians were killed and injured in intensified bombardment by the Assad regime and Russian forces on Idlib province. Towns and villages in northern rural Homs have recently been subjected to heavy shelling amid continued mass forced displacement of the local population form Rural Damascus.
Activists said that a man and a woman were killed and three other civilians were wounded in airstrikes and artillery shelling by regime forces on the village of Al-Barisah near the town of Sinjar and on the town of Habeet in southern rural Idlib.
Local activists said that dozens of rockets, barrel bombs, and mortar shells hit the towns and villages in southern rural Idlib on Tuesday. The Syrian Coalition warned of a humanitarian disaster should the bombardment on Idlib continues. It stressed that the international community has a responsibility to protect about three million civilians living in the province.
Moscow did not abide by any of its commitments, including the ones it made during of the Astana talks, the Coalition said in a statement. “This situation cannot continue as such behavior risks undermining the political process and poses a threat to the political solution as a whole.”
Last week, Catherine Marchi-Uhel, head of the UN International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism, said that her team had already collected around 700,000 documents that would be used as evidence of the war crimes that have been committed in Syria since the Syrian revolution began in March 2011.
Marchi-Uhel said that hear team stood ready to act quickly to collect more documents proving war crimes were committed against civilians in Syria.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres earlier called for the referral of Syria to the International Criminal Court to hold perpetrators of war crimes to account. (Source: Syrian Coalition’s Media Department)
