Shelling kills 18 civilians in northwest Syria

Regime bombardment has killed 18 civilians in the last major region outside government control in northwest 48 hours ago, a war monitor said Saturday.

Artillery and rocket fire launched by regime forces took the lives of eight children, seven men and three men in the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Idlib region.

The deadly bombardment hit the towns of Maaret al-Noman and Khan Sheikhun, said the Britain-based monitor, which links to sources for Syria.

Idlib region is mainly controlled by the jihadists of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a Syrian group led by Al-Qaeda fighters, after they have gone back smaller, Turkey-backed rebel outfits.

Since September, the region has been protected from a massive regime by a rebel backer Turkey.

But sporadic regime bombing has continued to hit the region, and hundreds of missiles rained down on Maaret al-Noman, Khan Sheikhun, and other areas on Friday and Saturday.

Almost eight years into Syria’s grinding civil war, President Bashar al-Assad’s regime controls around two-thirds of the country.

His army and allied fighters have made great gains against rebels and jihadists since Russia’s military intervention on the side of Damascus in 2015.

The war started in 2011 with the brutal repression of anti-Assad protests, and has since spiraled into a complex conflict involving more than 360,000 people.

Friday and Saturday’s deadly bombardment comes from the world of US-backed forces to expel the Islamic State group from a final holdout in eastern Syria, marking the end of the jihadists’ self-declared “caliphate.”

Source: i24NEWS – Shelling kills 18 civilians in northwest Syria: monitor