GENEVA — United Nations investigators said on Monday that
Russia had committed war crimes in Syria by carrying out indiscriminate airstrikes on civilian targets in 2019, condemning tactics they said the Syrian government and its allies were still using in the northwest province of Idlib.
The investigators also said that Syrian rebels allied with Turkey had carried out war crimes during the invasion of Kurdish areas in northern Syria, and that Al Qaeda-linked rebels had inflicted scores of civilian casualties in rocket attacks on government-held areas.
Their accusations were made in the latest report of the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Syria, the Geneva-based panel that has been monitoring the nearly decade-old conflict in Syria.
The investigators said
Russian aircraft had carried out a “double tap” attack on a market last July 22, killing at least 43 civilians, and an airstrike on a camp for displaced civilians in August that killed at least 20 people.
In both airstrikes, “the Russian Air Force did not direct the attacks at a specific military objective, amounting to the war crime of launching indiscriminate attacks in civilian areas,” the three-person panel said, citing eyewitness accounts, video footage and intercepted communications with pilots conducting the strikes.
The findings of the commission, which will present its report to the United Nations Human Rights Council next week, provided an authoritative and independent assessment of Russian conduct in the Syria conflict that corroborated reporting by human rights groups and media, including The New York Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/02/world/middleeast/united-nations-syria-idlib-russia.html
