Children among 5 killed in Russian strikes on Syria: monitor

ARMANAZ, Syria: Russian air strikes on the last major armed opposition stronghold in Syria killed five civilians from the same family, including three children, rescuers and a war monitor said on Tuesday.

Moscow is one of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s key backers, providing him with military, political and economic support in the country’s 12-year civil war.

“On December 25 at 10:00 pm (0700 GMT) Russian warplanes targeted civilian houses” on the outskirts of the town of Armanaz, in Idlib province, said Abdel Halim Shehab of the White Helmets voluntary search-and-rescue group.

Members of the White Helmets, which operates in rebel-held areas of northern Syria, pulled the victims from under the rubble of their house, he said.

“The victims were from the same family of six: five of them were killed and a child survived,” he said, identifying the dead as the father, mother and three of their children.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor with a network of sources across the war-torn country, also said Russia carried out the strikes.

The Britain-based organisation reported the same toll of five dead and said the family’s house was located on farmland near Armanaz. On Tuesday, Syrian state news agency SANA reported that the army had downed and destroyed “eight terrorist drones in Idlib and Aleppo provinces”.

Citing the defence ministry, it said forces responded to attempts to attack villages, towns and “military points”.

A brutal Syrian government crackdown on Arab Spring-inspired protests that erupted in 2011 spiralled into a devastating war involving foreign armies, militias and jihadists.