The government of Bashar al-Assad has been accused of bombing a Syrian refugee camp near the Turkish border, in an attack that activists and officials said left dozens of civilians dead and wounded.
The airstrikes on Thursday afternoon near Sarmada, a town in Idlib province just 20km away from Reyhanli, left the camp in ruins, with one witness describing a scene of horror, with tents on fire and body parts strewn around the area.
“We don’t know yet if it’s Syrian or Russian aircraft, but they struck in the middle of the camp and many of the tents have been burned,” said Alaa Fatraoui, a journalist based in the area who visited the scene after the attack.
He added: “There are many martyrs and body parts. I saw with my own eyes nearly 30 dead. It’s a very bloody scene. It’s revenge against civilians. There are absolutely no armed men there, they’re all civilian refugees, homeless people living on the street.”
The opposition’s Syrian National Coalition said that more than 30 people were killed in the attack and dozens were injured. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group with contacts inside Syria, said dozens had been left dead or wounded, seven of whom were children.
Images provided by activists in the area showed civil defence workers putting out fires with debris and burned-out tent husks on the ground.
The camp, called al-Kammouneh, is believed to have as many as 500 tents, with about six or seven family members on average per household. The majority of them are civilians who fled the fighting in the countryside in nearby Aleppo province, where an offensive by the Syrian government is threatening to cause a humanitarian catastrophe.
A cessation of hostilities brokered by Russia and the US brought a measure of relief to Aleppo on Thursday. But fighting continued nearby and Assad said he still sought total victory over rebels in Syria.
Assad said in a telegram to Russian President Vladimir Putin that his army would not accept anything less than “attaining final victory” and “crushing the aggression” by rebels in Aleppo, according to state media.
“We call on Russia to urgently address this totally unacceptable statement,” US state department spokesman Mark Toner told a briefing. “It’s clearly an effort by Assad to push his agenda, but it is incumbent on Russia to assert influence on that regime to maintain the cessation of hostilities.”
Toner sought to address confusion over the timeline for the cessation of hostilities, with Syrian state media saying the army would abide by a “regime of calm” in Aleppo for 48 hours from 2200 GMT on Wednesday and the state department emphasising it was open-ended.
Russia blocked a British-drafted UN security council statement, which would have condemned the surge in violence in Aleppo and attacks against civilians.
“There is one country that could not agree it and it’s Russia,” Britain’s UN ambassador Matthew Rycroft told reporters. “That does speak volumes about their support for protection of the Assad regime.”
The Sarmada attack highlighted the growing savagery of the conflict in the aftermath of the collapse of a ceasefire deal brokered by the US and Russia meant to pave the way for peace negotiations.
The talks in Geneva were deadlocked amid the government delegation’s refusal to discuss a transition that would see Assad eased out of power, and the ceasefire’s fate was effectively sealed by the launch of the regime’s offensive last weekend in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and its former commercial capital.
It comes days after the government destroyed a hospital backed by the Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières, killing the last paediatrician left in rebel-held eastern Aleppo, and a rebel attack on a maternity hospital in the government-controlled west of the city.
The attack raises questions over the safety of refugees who were uprooted in the war and settled in refugee camps near the Turkish border. Ankara has repeatedly called for safe zones in the area to protect the refugees from airstrikes, but the proposals have been met with a shrug by western powers involved in the conflict. Refugees fleeing recent fighting have been kept on the Syrian side of the border rather than being admitted into Turkey.
