Residential Buildings Are Razed to the Ground in Raids on Aleppo

Tuesday night in the city of Aleppo was the most violent since the start of events in Syria, and the Syrian opposition announced that Russian and Syrian aircraft carried out more than 100 air raids on besieged eastern neighbourhoods in conjunction with unprecedented missile attacks and bombardments which led to the complete destruction of a large number of buildings. Dozens of civilians were also killed and wounded.

An AFP correspondent reporting from an eastern neighbourhood in Aleppo said that “These neighbourhoods were targeted by more than a hundred strikes that extended to the city and its suburbs after midnight on Wednesday morning and they lasted until dawn. This prevented residents from sleeping due to the intensity of the shelling”. He added that the raids “did not stop until after it began to rain heavily in the morning”.

The bombing that targeted the Sukkari neighbourhood in eastern Aleppo continued after midnight and completely destroyed a six-storey building. A resident of the neighbourhood called Abu Ahmed told the AFP correspondent, whilst he removed stones and broken glass from in front of a nearby building, that “There were only two brothers in the building. An hour before the bombing, I visited them and we drank tea together. One of them advised me to vacate my house on the fourth floor and move, with my family, to the lower floors because of the repeated aerial bombardment.” He added that “An hour after I left, a missile attacked the neighbourhood and destroyed the entire building and killed the two brothers.”

On his part, the military spokesman for the Fastaqim Kama Umirt group Ammar Saqqar told Asharq Al-Awsat that “Russian and Syrian aircraft intensified their raids on residential areas occupied by civilians in the besieged area in Aleppo. They used barrel bombs and missiles to kill as many people as possible”. He also confirmed that the bombing targeted the neighbourhoods of “Al-Qatirji, Al-Mashhad, Salah Addin and Sukkari, amongst other neighbourhoods”.

For the first time, the number of victims is unknown because the raids are ongoing. Saqqar said that “So far, we do not have accurate statistics about the number of victims but we do know that there are many, and there are still bodies under the rubble of four residential buildings that were completely destroyed.” He continued by saying “The raids continue and every 10 minutes there is a strike, and this is taking place in a besieged area that does not have a sufficient stock of medicines”. Saqqar continued by saying that hospitals in Aleppo are unable to accommodate the injured because most of them are out of service after Russian aircraft destroyed them. He also said that “Most of the wounded are being treated in the streets”.

Residential Buildings Are Razed to the Ground in Raids on Aleppo