Beirut, Oct 6 (EFE).- At least seven people were killed, two children, and 52 others wounded Friday in a blitz of attacks by Syrian government forces and their ally Russia against opposition areas in the country’s northwest, in apparent retaliation for Thursday’s major bombing.
The White Helmets rescue group, which operates in opposition-held areas of Syria, counted at least seven deaths due to “intense and continuous aerial, artillery and missile bombardment by regime forces and Russia.”
In addition, 52 people, including 19 minors, were wounded in various locations in the Idlib and Aleppo provinces, which are out of Damascus control, according to the latest tally provided by the rescuers on their X (formerly Twitter) account.
Troops loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad are attacking rebel areas in the northwest of the country relatively often, with occasional bombing raids by Moscow’s air force, which has intervened militarily in Syria on Damascus’s behalf since 2015.
But the Syrian army’s ground operations have intensified significantly since Thursday afternoon, apparently in response to a drone strike hours earlier that killed 89 people and wounded 277 during a graduation ceremony at a military academy in the central province of Homs.
The Syrian government attributed the action to “terrorists,” a term it often uses to refer to the insurgent groups it is fighting in the armed conflict that began nearly a dozen years ago and which still hold large parts of Idlib and Aleppo.
Some experts question whether these groups, the most prominent of which is the Islamist alliance Organization for the Liberation of the Levant, which includes the former Syrian affiliate of al-Qaeda, have the operational and logistical capacity to launch such a significant attack in Homs. EFE
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