On Wednesday, the Syrian Air Force struck the Aleppo-area town of Azaz [Ezzaz or Azzaz or Izaz], very near the border with Turkey, killing over 40 people, and causing widescale damage to a civilian area, as this photo shows:
This photo was posted on Twitter here by @NMSyria.
Despite the proximity to the border, the only reported Turkish response was to take in the wounded for medical treatment. Some of the seriously wounded later died in Turkey, compounding confusion about numbers of mortalities.
Voice of America [VOA] reporter Scott Bobb, in the town yesterday for an interview with “a local rebel commander”, was present and apparently taken by surprise at the time of the attack. He reported that “Azaz [Ezzaz] has been in rebel control for weeks and was not a government target until Wednesday…’This town had been held by the FSA for some time. It was fairly stable and many of the refugees had returned. Locals say it was the first bombing they have experienced”… His report is posted here.
Bobb also reported that “The citizens are panicking. Many have just jumped into whatever vehicle they have – cars, tractors, motorcycles – and headed away from the town with the fear that this may be the beginning of an offensive … I have seen dozens of people fleeing, often families, sometimes three or four on a motorcycle. I saw one family of about six on a farm tractor crossing through a rural road, an olive tree field, and others have come through in ambulances, pickup trucks, civilian vehicles, cars”…
But there were many who didn’t flee immediately, including those who were helping to search through the rubble of destroyed buildings, looking for survivors or for bodies, as this photo, also posted on Twitter here by @NMSyria, shows:
- UPDATE: Human Rights Watch [HRW] has compiled a report during a visit two hours after the attacks by a Syrian fighter jet on Wednesday, and is now saying that 40 people were killed, and more than 100 were wounded. HRW said that: “at least two bombs destroyed an entire block of houses in the al-Hara al-Kablie neighborhood of Azaz, in Syria’s northern Aleppo province … Azaz residents told Human Rights Watch that, at around 3 p.m., they saw a fighter jet drop at least two bombs on the residential area. Within seconds, dozens of houses in an area of approximately 70-by-70 meters – more than half a football field – were flattened. Houses on the surrounding streets were significantly damaged, with collapsed walls and ceilings. On the streets around the bombed area, windows were broken and some walls had collapsed. Two opposition Free Syrian Army facilities in the vicinity of the attack might have been targets of the Syrian aircraft, Human Rights Watch said. One was the headquarters of the local Free Syrian Army brigade, in the former building of the Baath party, two streets away from the block that was hit. The other was a detention facility where the Free Syrian Army held ‘security detainees’ – government military personnel and members of pro-government shabeeha militia. Neither of these facilities was damaged in the attack … The exact number of victims is difficult to verify. Most of the wounded were transported to hospitals across the nearby Turkish border”. This report is posted here.
Other reports, on Twitter, claimed that one or more “vacuum” bombs had been dropped in the government aerial attack on Azaz on Wednesday.
In the aftermath, Syria’s membership in the Organization of the Islamic Conference [OIC] was suspended overnight, as it had been months earlier in the Arab League.
And, a two-person committee appointed by the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva issued its latest report, on developments from 15 February to 20 July. This latest report is the first since the International Committee of the Red Cross [ICRC] made a determination [it is apparently up to the ICRC to do this] that the conflict in Syria had reached the level of civil war.
The UN HRC-appointed committee is composed of human rights expert Paulo Pinheiro of Brazil and Karen Abu Zayd of the U.S., has not been permitted to enter Syria, and is working from compiled reports and visits to neighboring countries in the region, as well as by interviews conducted over the phone and by Skype.
Their latest report said there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that the documented instances reported to them show “widespread or systematic attack against predominantly civilian population”. And, the UN HRC report said, the commission concluded that the scale of the attacks on a predominantly civilian population showed they were “conducted pursuant to State policy”.
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