Not less than 45 civilians have been killed and some 175 others wounded when aircraft bombed a northern Syrian city controlled by Islamic State, as Bashar al-Assad’s government stepped up air raids, a monitoring group and residents said on Friday. Reuters reports:
Helicopters and war planes dropped barrel bombs — steel drums full of shrapnel and explosives — on residential and industrial areas in the city of al Bab and neighboring Qabaseen, northeast of Aleppo, on Thursday and overnight, locals said.
“People were going about scraping a living and there were no armed groups in the market, only poor people. Why is Assad killing us? May God bring vengeance on him,” said Yousef al-Saadi, a resident of Qabaseen and a volunteer with the local civil defense group who was contacted on Skype.
Syrian state media did not report the strikes on al Bab, a city of around 100,000 people that has been a target of heavy government strikes since the start of U.S- led military campaign against Islamic State, an Islamist militant group, in Syria in late September.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 37 civilians were killed. The British-based group, which gathers information from a variety of sources, said there had been an increase in air raids by the Syrian military across rebel held areas in the last three days.
