Beirut, February 7, 2017 – Air strikes in Syria on Tuesday killed 37 people in the country’s northwest, most of them civilians, a monitoring group said.
The headquarters of a Syrian militant group and the surrounding neighborhood in Idlib city were battered by at least 10 strikes at dawn, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The Observatory, which relies on a network of sources in Syria for its reports, said the death toll included 24 civilians, mostly women, and children.
Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said the raids were probably carried out by Russian warplanes — allied with Syria’s government — or by a US-backed air coalition.
But Russia quickly denied it had struck Idlib.
“Russian military planes did not carry out a single strike in Idlib yesterday, or this week, or even since the beginning of 2017,” the defense ministry in Moscow said.
Russia has waged a fierce bombing campaign in support of the Damascus regime since September 2015, a year after the US-led coalition began its own strikes against jihadist groups.
On Tuesday, a Pentagon spokesman said US forces targeted Al-Qaeda operatives “in two precision strikes” on February 3 and 4.
Rebel groups have held Idlib province since the spring of 2015, four years after the Syria conflict first broke out.
More than 310,000 people have died since, and millions have been forced to flee their homes.

Source: AFP