Russia’s intervention in the multisided war in Syria in September 2015 saved the day for the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
Thanks to the Kremlin, the Syrian government was able to step back from the brink of being overthrown by rebel forces. In the ensuing years, it has restored control over much of the country.
But saving the only pro-Russian ruling Arab dynasty cost a heavy price — in lives, infrastructure and treasure. And the Kremlin didn’t hesitate to pay it, purposely killing thousands of civilians, turning millions more into refugees and destroying cities in rebel-held areas.
Even now, after the Russian campaign in Syria has largely achieved its goals, the Russian air force continues to inflict civilian misery. This time, the aim is to exhaust the resistance of the last rebel-held stronghold, the city of Idlib in the country’s northwest.
In its latest report on the Syrian hostilities, which have killed an estimated 500,000 people since 2011, the global human rights watchdog Amnesty International directly accuses Russia of committing war crimes in Idlib in the last few months of its air campaign. The organization has the facts to prove it, too.
And as the humanitarian situation grows more catastrophic in the besieged region, where at least 3 million embattled civilians live, the Kremlin continues to indiscriminately bombard places like schools and hospitals.
Amnesty International says these airstrikes are a crime against humanity committed by a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, whose job is to preserve peace and protect human rights.
Syrian army soldiers get deployed in a countryside area in the south of Idlib province on March 4, 2020. (AFP)
Documented facts
On May 12, Amnesty issued its report on the period of hostilities between December 2019 and March 2020, including the latest Syrian-Russian offensive in Idlib.
It was a bloody battle. Turkey inflicted heavy casualties upon the Syrian Army. Nonetheless, the Russian-backed Syrian regime managed to recapture the Damascus- Aleppo road, also known as the M5 highway, and a number of strategically important areas like Saraqeb in southern Idlib and western Aleppo provinces.
On March 5, Turkey mediated yet another cease-fire with Moscow, Damascus and the rebels.
For Idlib civilians, the massive air and ground campaign became “a new wave of horrors,” Amnesty said in its report. According to the UN, it precipitated an exodus of nearly 1 million civilians to the Turkish border — away from the bloodbath.
The UN called this humanitarian disaster one of the worst since the war’s outbreak.
“In an all-too-familiar pattern, attacks from the air and the ground repeatedly struck residential areas and crucial infrastructure,” Amnesty International noted in its report.
“Yet even by the standards of this calamitous nine-year crisis, the resulting displacement and humanitarian emergency were unprecedented.”
Numerous reports from the region describe scores of civilians trapped in the enclave amid frosty winter weather or trying to survive in overcrowded tent camps with almost no basic sanitary infrastructure or access to clean water, food, and medicine.
Amnesty interviewed 74 persons, including the direct witnesses to Russian-Syrian air attacks, displaced persons, and international aid workers. It has also examined and verified scores of videos and photographs, satellite imagery, and logs of aircraft observations, as well as intercepted aircraft radio communication.
As a result, the organization was able to document a total of 18 attacks on hospitals and schools in Idlib, Hama, and Aleppo provinces carried out between May 2019 and late February 2020. At least seven were air attacks by Russian forces and four more were conducted in cooperation with Syrian regime forces, the organization says.
A displaced Syrian woman prepares to put up a mattress in the midst of the rubble of their destroyed home upon рук return to the town of Ariha in the Idlib province on May 4, 2020. (AFP)
Prohibited weapons
Backed by mass Russian airpower, regime forces often purposefully concentrated their strikes on medical facilities and schools, which are often used as shelters for the displaced population.
According to local sources — specifically, the Idlib Health Directorate — at least 53 medical facilities and 95 schools were targeted by Russian-Syrian forces in the rebel enclave between April 2019 and February 2020. Ten hospitals were attacked during the late 2019- early 2020 offensive in Idlib alone, killing nine medical staff, whose work is in extreme demand all across the country.
In particular, on Jan. 29, the Russian air force launched a series of three airstrikes on the al-Shami hospital in the town of Ariha. The Russian missiles failed to deliver a direct hit upon the hospital, but they effectively targeted three residential buildings just next door, killing at least 11 and injuring 35.
“The attack happened while the medical staff were at the hospital,” Amnesty International wrote, quoting a doctor who survived the assault.
“It was a normal day. The first strike was around 10:35 p.m. I was on the ground floor sitting at my desk as usual. I heard a warplane but only for a second and then the explosion happened. I didn’t have time to hide. I went outside to see what had happened. After five minutes, the second strike happened.
“I felt the heat as if I was in an oven. I was okay, but I saw the body of one staff member at the entrance. I called for help and two medical staff carried his body to the basement, but he didn’t make it. The third strike happened around 15 minutes after.”
On another occasion, Feb. 25, Syrian aviation assaulted the al-Baraem school in Idlib. Three teachers were killed and at least five more people were injured.
A projectile detonated in the school’s playground, slaughtering people with several explosions at a time.
“Around 9 a.m. the director rang the bell and asked us to leave the school,” a teacher survivor told Amnesty International.
“We all quickly evacuated. A bomblet exploded close to my feet, blowing the flesh off. The pain was unbearable. I felt heat as if my feet were burning. Two students were walking in front of me. One died instantly and the other one, miraculously, survived.”
Witnesses to the al-Baraem attack particularly emphasized the use of cluster munitions, describing it “as if the sky was raining shrapnel.”
Amnesty International experts examined images of the incident and identified the al-Baraem projectile as a surface-fired 220-millimeter 9M27K missile produced by Russia and handed over to the Syrian military in the war.
The projectile contained 9N210 or 9N235 cluster munitions directly prohibited under international law.
“The documented attacks by Syrian and Russian government forces entailed a myriad of serious violations of international humanitarian law,” the organization concluded.
“To name a few, the attacks were not directed at a specific military object and they violated the immunity from direct attack of civilians and civilian objects, as well as the special protection afforded to specific persons and objects, particularly medical facilities, medical personnel, and children. ”
“These violations amount to war crimes. The attacks must also be viewed in the context of the well-established pattern of Syrian government forces targeting civilian infrastructure and civilians in areas under the control of armed opposition groups as part of a widespread and systematic attack on the civilian population, therefore constituting crimes against humanity.”
An aerial view shows the Atme camp for displaced Syrians close to the border with Turkey in Syria’s northwestern Idlib province, on April 19, 2020. (AFP)
Unprovable in court
Amnesty particularly called upon the Russian and Syrian governments to refrain from disproportionate and indiscriminate attacks targeting civilian infrastructure — but it also appealed to rebels in Idlib, particularly to Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, urging them to stop employing “imprecise explosive weapons such as rockets in populated areas.”
It is the very nature of the Syrian conflict — in which the rebels’ guerrilla warfare is multiplied by the Russian-Syrian forces’ heavy-handed, cold-blooded approach to hostilities — that leads inevitably to such war crimes and civilian deaths and casualties, says Ilya Kusa, a Middle East expert with Kyiv- based think tank Ukrainian Institute for the Future.
“In those densely populated cities and towns, rebels operate among civilian infrastructure, too,” the expert says.
This leads to an acceleration of the hostilities, according to Kusa.
“When a strike is delivered upon a civilian target, this is definitely a war crime,” he says. “But I am not sure if Amnesty International can verify the fact that there was no military necessity behind a certain incident. They are not present in Syria, just like almost no one is from among international observers.
“Due to the severe lack of credible information on what’s happening in Syria, investigating such war crimes is almost impossible, Kusa says. And it is even less possible to hold war criminals accountable under international law.
“It is not enough to only verify the fact that a strike killed civilians,” Kusa says. “In an international court of justice, one also needs to prove that it was a purposeful strike not justified by a military reason, which is almost impossible.”
“This is an immense problem — and a great tragedy of international law.”
