New satellite imagery, videos and eyewitness accounts reveal the indiscriminate nature of the government’s large-scale air campaign on opposition-held parts of Aleppo since November 2013. The attacks on populated areas in Aleppo and its countryside continue despite a UN Security Council resolution on February 22, 2014, demanding all parties cease “indiscriminate employment of weapons in populated areas, including shelling and aerial bombardment, such as the use of barrel bombs.”
The air attacks on Aleppo and its countryside have killed and wounded large numbers of civilians and led to large-scale displacement. One local group estimated that the attacks have killed 2,321 civilians in Aleppo governorate between November 1, 2013, and March 21, 2014.
“New satellite photos and witness accounts show the brutality unleashed on parts of Aleppo,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Use of barrel bombs in residential neighborhoods has done the expected: killed hundreds of civilians and driven thousands from their homes. If these indiscriminate dumb weapons managed to hit a military target, it would be sheer luck.”
Using satellite imagery analysis, Human Rights Watch identified at least 340 distinct sites in Aleppo city’s opposition-held neighborhoods that were damaged between early November and February 20, the date of the most recent image reviewed. The majority of these identified sites have damage signatures that are strongly consistent with the detonation of barrel bombs – unguided high explosive bombs, which are cheaply made, locally produced, and typically constructed from large oil drums, gas cylinders, and water tanks, filled with high explosives and scrap metal to enhance fragmentation, and then dropped from helicopters.
Damage sites were widely distributed across almost all neighborhoods under opposition control, with a majority falling in heavily built-up residential areas far from the frontline. In most of the cases about which Human Rights Watch spoke to witnesses, the witnesses said there were no military targets nearby, reflecting the indiscriminate nature of the strikes.
In mid-March – after the Security Council called for an end to barrel bomb attacks – refugees newly arrived in Turkey, and other people displaced inside Syria, described to a Human Rights Watch researcher recurrent, almost daily indiscriminate air attacks on residential and commercial areas in Aleppo, mostly by barrel bombs, far, they said, from any conceivable military target. The residents spoke consistently about seeing helicopters drop barrel bombs over them, the characteristic noise of the bombs while dropping and of seeing unexploded bombs, and remnants of what were clearly barrel bombs.
A barrel bomb attack in Hraytan, northwest of Aleppo, on December 19, decapitated Noura al-Abdu, aged 13, and severely injured a nine-year-old girl. She told Human Rights Watch that she was going down the stairs in her building when the bomb fell, severing her leg above the knee, and killing her relative. “We heard the helicopter but I couldn’t make it down in time [to hide],” she said. “The barrel came and killed Noura and took my legs.”
The repeated use of barrel bombs and other unguided high explosive bombson heavily built-up residential areas shows that these are not isolated incidents but suggest a strategy of deliberately attacking such areas. For instance, satellite imagery shows over 30 probable air strike damage sites in the residential neighborhoods of Masaken Hanano and Jouret Awad in Aleppo city, destroying more than 100 buildings. Human Rights Watch was unable to reach witnesses from Jouret Awad, but two witnesses from Masaken Hanano told Human Rights Watch that while there was an opposition barracks in the neighborhood that neither these barracks nor any other military target were near the areas struck by barrel bombs.
According to the Violations Documentation Center (VDC), a Syria-based monitoring group, there were more than 266 airstrikes on Aleppo and its countryside between November 1, 2013, and January 31, 2014, killing at least 1,380 civilians, including 441 children, 78 women, and 14 combatants. Based on interviews with doctors and hospitals, VDC estimates that more than 20,000 were wounded as a result of these attacks. The organization has recorded 2,321 fatalities from airstrikes in the same region between November 1 and March 21. The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), another local group, has reported that the government’s airstrikes on Aleppo city and surrounding rural areas killed 2,426, including 2,401 civilians, between November 23, 2013, and February 24, 2014.
The air campaign has also displaced large parts of the civilian population from opposition-held Aleppo. A Syrian relief coordinator in the Turkish border town of Kilis who was registering refugees living in urban areas told Human Rights Watch in mid-March that approximately 5,000 to 6,000 families from Aleppo had sought refuge in Kilis since the government’s air offensive intensified in November 2013.
In a resolution adopted unanimously on February 22, the UN Security Council demanded that all parties “immediately cease all attacks against civilians,” referring explicitly to ending “the indiscriminate employment of weapons in populated areas, including shelling and aerial bombardment, such as the use of barrel bombs.” The council also explicitly expressed “its intent to take further steps in the case of non-compliance with this resolution.”
Military commanders should not, as a matter of policy, order the use of explosive weapons with wide-area effects in populated areas due to the foreseeable harm to civilians, Human Rights Watch said.By using barrel bombs on densely populated areas, Syrian government forces used means and methods of warfare that could not distinguish between civilians and combatants, making attacks indiscriminate and therefore unlawful.
Given Syria’s continuing indiscriminate air war against civilian areas, the Security Council should impose an arms embargo on Syria’s government, as well as on any groups implicated in widespread or systematic human rights abuses, and refer the situation to the International Criminal Court (ICC), Human Rights Watch said. Such an embargo would limit the Syrian government’s ability to conduct aerial attacks, including by ensuring that Syria does not receive new helicopters or have its current helicopters serviced overseas.
Further, in light of compelling evidence that the Syrian army and security forces are responsible for ongoing war crimes and crimes against humanity against Syria’s people, companies and individuals that continue to provide arms, ammunition or materiel to Syria or to opposition forces that have been implicated in crimes against humanity or war crimes risk complicity in these crimes, Human Rights Watch warned.
Under international law, providing weapons to forces or armed groups in Syria that are likely to be used in the commission of crimes against humanity may amount to assisting in the commission of those crimes. Any arms supplier could bear potential criminal liability as an accessory to those crimes and could face prosecution, Human Rights Watch said.“For three years the Syrian government has declared open season on civilians with almost no consequences,” Whitson said. “The UN Security Council should respond to this disregard of its resolution, including by imposing an arms embargo, to show there will be penalties for widespread human rights violations.”
Human Rights Watch identified at least 340 distinct damage sites in Aleppo city’s opposition-held neighborhood damaged between early November and February 20, 2014, by analyzing four satellite images recorded over the city between October 31, 2013, and February 20, 2014. The heaviest concentration of the 340 distinct damage sites identified in Aleppo city were in the neighborhoods of al-Marjet, Jouret Awwad, al-Myassar, Helwaniye/Tariq al-Bab, Salheen, al-Sakhour, al-Heidariyya, Dahret Awwad, and Masaken Hanano.
Both the level and the location of this destruction varied from the damage Aleppo had seen prior to this government offensive. Approximately 300 major damage sites were identified from earlier dates of satellite imagery recorded between mid-2012 to October 31, 2013, a number now exceededin less than four months. And the pattern of these sites shifted, with earlier sites more concentrated in certain neighborhoods and closer to disputed areas, and the newer sites revealing wide scale destruction of neighborhoods that had been relatively undamaged and were further from active conflict.
Although some of the damage sites identified in the satellite imagery were likely caused by the effects of other explosive weapons, such as prolonged artillery shelling and a handful of apparent attacks by guided munitions, a substantial majority of these 340 sites have damage signatures strongly consistent with the detonation of high explosive unguided bombs.
Barrel bombs, and other high explosive unguided bombs, tend to create larger zones of building destruction than is typically seen with other types of air strikes and artillery fire, often with irregularly shaped blast craters of shallow depth with “scalloped edges.”
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