The Banned Bombs Being Dropped on Idlib

[TomSea]

The Banned Bombs Being Dropped on Idlib
Ty Joplin    Published June 6th, 2019 - 09:49 GMT

The assault, which followed after months of intense Russian and Syrian airstrikes, started on May 6 and has already killed almost 300 civilians and displaced over 300,000. But regime and Russian forces have relied on particularly brutal strategy to make life in rebel-held territory unlivable and have used a wide array of destructive weapons to achieve this end.

“The Syrian-Russian military alliance is using a cocktail of internationally banned and indiscriminate weapons on a trapped civilian population,” Lama Fakih, acting Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, said. These weapons include incendiary munitions, which are wreaking havoc on Idlib’s farmlands, bunker-buster missiles used against hospitals built deep underground, indiscriminate cluster munitions and payloads of barrel bombs dropped on civilian targets.

Though horrific, the tactics being deployed now in Idlib and northern Hama closely follow a key strategy the regime has used since it began losing territory early in the civil war: terrorize civilians in rebel-held territory so thoroughly that they are pressed into making an impossible choice, try to brave the bombing campaign or relent and move to the relative safety of regime-controlled areas.

Read more at: https://www.albawaba.com/news/banned-bombs-being-dropped-idlib-1289779