Russia air raids, regime strikes in Syria kill at least 21: monitor

Beirut, Nov 21 (AFP/APP): Attacks by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces and air raids by his ally Russia killed at least 21 civilians including 10 children in rebel-held Idlib province on Wednesday, a monitoring group said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, in an updated toll, said a ground-to-ground missile fired by regime forces that hit a makeshift camp for the displaced near Qah village close to the border with Turkey killed 15 civilians, including six children, and wounded around 40 others.

The missile crashed near a maternity facility in the camp, it said.

Elsewhere, “Russian military aircraft” targeted the town of Maaret al-Numan in the south of the province, the Observatory said, and “six civilians were killed, among them four children”.

A number of people were wounded in the raid, some “in a critical state”, and the toll there was likely to rise, the Britain-based monitor’s head Rami Abdel Rahman reported.

Syrian air defenses respond to missile attack

A photographer who works with AFP saw rescue workers retrieve the dust-covered body of a girl from debris and place her in an ambulance.

The northwestern Idlib region is dominated by Islamists of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group (HTS), formerly the Syrian affiliate of Al-Qaeda.

Most of Idlib province remains out of the control of the Syrian regime, as do adjacent areas of Aleppo, Hama and Latakia provinces.