The New York Times
Rescue workers pulled children and other victims from the rubble of their homes in insurgent-held northern Syria on Tuesday morning after the latest aerial bombardments killed dozens of people.
The attacks in the cities of Idlib and Aleppo began Monday night, and, witnesses said, they appeared to be airstrikes conducted by Syrian government forces or their Russian allies. Rescue workers and antigovernment activists said that more than 20 people had been killed, with dozens more injured.
In Idlib, eight strikes around the National Hospital destroyed several buildings in a crowded area of the city; earlier, opposition activists had said the hospital had been struck. The attacks disrupted services at one of the area’s few remaining hospitals; in Aleppo, a hospital was damaged.
Video posted online by anti-government activists showed rescuers from the Syria Civil Defense, a Western-funded group also known as the White Helmets, working amid rubble and half-destroyed buildings near the National Hospital. One worker pulled a toddler from underneath broken slabs of concrete, still alive.
A staff member for Save the Children was killed in the Idlib strikes along with several other people while trying to rescue others trapped in a building that had been destroyed, the organization said in a statement Tuesday.
The group said that the attacks in Idlib and nearby Aleppo on Monday night had the hallmarks of a “double tap” strike in which rescuers responding to an attack are targeted in a second strike. The Save the Children staff member, a 23-year-old man, was part of an emergency response team who were training volunteer rescuers after an initial attack when they were hit by another airstrike.
Hospitals have been hit regularly during the five-year civil war in Syria — sometimes several hospitals or clinics in a single day. Earlier this spring, more than half a dozen medical facilities were attacked in about a week in the divided city of Aleppo.
Opposition activists and international human rights groups have said that hospitals appear to be deliberately targeted by government forces as a way of punishing civilians in rebel-held areas. Most of the hospitals have been hit by pro-government forces, according to Physicians for Human Rights, a group that tracks the episodes.
The Russian and Syrian governments have said that they are carrying out attacks aimed at terrorists, and Russia has denied that its strikes have caused civilian casualties, saying that they are aimed at the Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front and Islamic State militants. Opposition groups have said the Russian strikes also target relatively moderate rebel groups.
“The Russian aviation hasn’t performed any combat tasks, moreover hasn’t conducted any airstrikes in the province of Idlib,” the Russian Defense Ministry spokesman, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, said Tuesday in a statement quoted by The Associated Press.
The latest barrage in Idlib came a day before a deadline that the United States, Russia and other interested governments had set for themselves to deliver supplies by airdrop to besieged areas even without permission from the Syrian government. President Bashar al-Assad has blocked land delivery of aid to towns besieged by his forces.
Now, United Nations officials appear to be backing away from airdrops, saying that the United Nations aid agency rules require permission from the Syrian government — something that is unlikely to happen because there is no reason to expect that the government would allow airdrops in areas where it has prohibited land convoys.
Airdrops are more expensive and less reliable than ground deliveries, but several have been carried out with government permission to Deir al-Zour, which is under assault by Islamic State militants.