Barrel bombs kill 20 people in Aleppo's Bustan Al Qasr

At least 20 people were killed in Aleppo’s Bustan al-Qasr on Friday when barrel bombs dropped by Basher al-Assad’s forces on the embattled neighborhood, activists and monitoring group said.

Sources to Zaman Alwasl said that army troops have intensified shelling on Bustan Al-Qaser to suffocate Islamist rebels and to push them to open Karaj al-Hajez crossing as people of regime-held areas suffer siege and lack of food staples.  

An activist group said on Friday, according to AP, that barrel bombs dropped on Aleppo have killed nearly 2,000 people so far this year.

 The grim figure is the latest addition to the deadly tally from Syria's civil war, which has killed more than 162,000 people, according to activists. The crude bombs — known as barrel bombs — are shrapnel-packed explosive devices that Syrian forces have been rolling out of helicopters over rebel-held neighborhoods.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights — one of the main groups counting the dead in the three-year-long conflict — said Friday there were 1,963 deaths in 2014 from barrel bombs in Aleppo, including 283 women and 567 people under the age of 18.

According to the Observatory, 14 people are dying on average every day in Aleppo because of the barrel bombs. The containers, or barrels, are usually packed with hundreds of kilograms (pounds) of explosives as well as scraps of metal and are intended to cause massive damage on impact.

A U.N. Security Council resolution adopted in February demanded, among other things, a halt to all attacks on civilians in Syria and indiscriminate shelling and aerial bombardment, including the use of barrel bombs in populated areas.

In March, the New York-based Human Rights Watch said it used satellite imagery to identify at least 340 places in rebel-controlled areas of Aleppo that were damaged between early November and Feb. 20. The majority of the sites bore signatures of damage consistent with barrel bombs, it said.

Aleppo, Syria's largest city and once its commercial center, has been carved into rebel- and government-controlled areas since opposition fighters launched an offensive there in mid-2012. (With AP)