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Air raid casualties add up in Daraa

DEADLY DARAA: Regime warplanes launched a series of airstrikes over […]


15 January 2015

Daraa1234

DEADLY DARAA: Regime warplanes launched a series of airstrikes over the divided city of Daraa and its outskirts Wednesday, leading to at least six civilian deaths, reported pro-opposition website SyrianPC.

“The regime is focusing its bombing on [rebel-controlled] areas of the city to force civilians to accept a truce with the regime,” al-Muatasem Billah, the alias of a citizen journalist in the city, told Syria Direct Thursday.

“The bombings killed 19 civilians across the entire province of Daraa; they are confirmed and we have names,” he added.

Above, residents evacuate an old man from the ruins of a building following one of Wednesday’s air strikes.

Wednesday’s casualty count is slated to grow as workers extract bodies from the rubble and some of the injured in critical condition pass away.

Pro-opposition al-Aan TV on Wednesday cited reports of “a massacre in the Tariq a-Sed neighborhood in Daraa, the number of casualties has not reached us until now, dozens of injured civilians.”

Although casualty figures from January are as of yet unavailable, the regime  killed 220 civilians and rebel fighters in December 2014, reported the Violations Documentation Center, a pro-opposition human rights organization that is one of the few bodies in Syria to still count casualties.

That makes Daraa the third-deadliest province in December, after Aleppo and the suburbs of Damascus.

The VDC does not count regime or allied militia casualties and does not include those killed by non-regime actors, stressing that its counts “are not final in any way, and they are subject to continuous and periodic scrutiny by the center’s activists.

-January 15, 2015

-Photo courtesy of @Omar_Hariri_Snn.

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