Russian strike kills 20 fleeing civilians in east Syria

BEIRUT: A Russian air strike killed at least 20 civilians on Wednesday as they tried to cross the Euphrates river to escape fighting in eastern Syria’s Deir Ezzor province, a monitor said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor, said children were among those killed as they tried to cross the river aboard rafts, escaping from areas where Russian-backed regime forces are battling the Islamic State group.

Two campaigns are being fought against the jihadist group in east Deir Ezzor, with one on the western side of the Euphrates river that slices diagonally across the province led by Syrian troops and backed by ally Russia.

The second is being fought by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, an alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters, on the eastern bank of the river.

The Observatory relies on a network of sources inside Syria, and says it determines whose planes carry out raids according to type, location, flight patterns and munitions used.

The group has reported hundreds of civilians killed in operations against IS in Deir Ezzor and neighbouring Raqa province, where the SDF is fighting with US support to capture the former jihadist bastion Raqa city.

On Tuesday, the Observatory said a US-led coalition strike in Raqa killed at least 18 civilians. The coalition says it takes all measures possible to avoid civilian casualties and that it investigates all credible allegations.

Last month, it acknowledged the deaths of over 700 civilians in its strikes in Syria and Iraq since 2014. Russia has not acknowledged any civilian deaths in its strikes since its intervened in Syria’s war in 2015, and dismisses the Observatory’s reporting as biased.

The deaths in Deir Ezzor on Wednesday prompted outrage from the opposition Syrian National Coalition which described the incident as a "heinous crime". More than 330,000 people have been killed in Syria since the conflict began in March 2011 with anti-government protests.        

In a related development, Sarin nerve agent was used in an ‘incident’ at a northern Syrian village in late March, five days before the deadly attack on Khan Sheikhun, the world’s chemical watchdog said on Wednesday.

"Analysis of samples collected (by the OPCW)... relates to an incident that took place again in the northern part of Syria on the 30th of March this year," the head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons told AFP in an interview.

"The results prove the existence of sarin," Ahmet Uzumcu said. The Khan Sheikhun attack on April 4 was previously believed to have been the first use of sarin since the deadly August 2013 attack in and around Damascus which killed hundreds of people.

Two days after Khan Sheikhun incident, the United States fired 59 Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian airbase from which it said the attack was launched. At least 87 people including 30 children died in the attack on Khan Sheikhun, a town in the opposition-held province of Idlib. But Uzumcu said on Wednesday sarin had also been used the opposition-held village called Latamneh, some 25 kilometres (15 miles) south of Khan Sheikhun on March 30.

"What we know at the moment is not much. Fifty people were reportedly injured. There were no deaths reported," he said. He said the OPCW’s fact-finding mission had retrieved soil samples, clothing and metal parts "which were sent to our laboratories and we received the results a few days ago."

It is "worrying that there is some sarin use or exposure even before the April 4 incident," he said. Uzumcu pointed out that the OPCW’s fact-finding mission team was unlikely to visit the area, where fighting is still ongoing between Syrian government forces and armed opposition groups.

"The (fact-finding team) is making every effort to contact the victims," Uzumcu said. Syria’s government has denied involvement and claims it no longer possesses chemical weapons after a 2013 agreement under which it pledged to surrender its chemical arsenal.

The OPCW earlier this year presented a report confirming sarin gas was used in the attack at Khan Sheikhun, but did not assign blame. But UN war crimes investigators last month said they had evidence that Syrian forces were behind the attacks, the first UN report to officially blame the Assad regime.