AZAZ, Syria — Syrian fighter jets screamed through the sky Wednesday over this rebel-held town, dropping bombs that levelled the better part of a poor neighbourhood and wounded scores of people, many of them women and children buried under piles of rubble.
Activists said more than 20 people were killed.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 23 people died in the double airstrike and more than 200 were wounded. Mohammed Nour, a local activist reached by phone, put the death toll at 25. Neither figure could be independently confirmed.
Reporters from The Associated Press saw nine dead bodies in the bombings’ immediate aftermath, including a baby.
The bombings sent panicked civilians fleeing for cover.
So many were wounded that the local hospital locked its doors, directing residents to drive to the nearby Turkish border so the injured could be treated on the other side.
One person’s remains were bundled into a small satchel.
A group of young men found a man buried in the wreckage of destroyed homes, his clothes torn and his limbs dirty, but still alive.
“God is great! God is great!” they chanted as they yanked him out and laid him on a blanket.
Nearby, a woman sat on a pile of bricks that once was her home, cradling a dead baby wrapped in a dirty cloth.
Two other bodies lay next to her, covered in blankets. S
he screamed and threw stones at a TV crew that tried to film her.
The bombing of Azaz, some 30 miles (50 kilometres) north of Aleppo, shattered the sense of control rebels have sought to project since they took the area from President Bashar Assad’s army last month. Azaz is also the town where rebels have been holding 11 Lebanese Shiites they captured in May.
The attack came on the same day the U.N. released a report accusing Assad’s forces and pro-government militiamen of war crimes during a May bloodbath in the village of Houla that killed more than 100 civilians, nearly half of them children.
It said rebels were also responsible for war crimes in at least three other killings.
The long-awaited report by the U.N. Human Rights Council marks the first time the world body has referred to events in Syria as war crimes — on both the government and rebel sides — and could be used in future prosecutions against Assad or others.
It said the scale of the Houla carnage indicated “involvement at the highest levels” of Syria’s military and government.
The council also said the conflict is moving in increasingly brutal directions on both sides.
Also on Wednesday, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, comprised of 57 member states, released a final statement from its two day summit in Saudi Arabia’s Muslim holy city of Mecca urging support of the opposition.
The statement did not mention suspending Syria’s membership, but OIC Secretary-General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu told reporters after the summit that the organization had agreed to do so. The move is largely symbolic.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi, whose nation is Assad’s most staunch regional supporter, told reporters before the opening session in Saudi Arabia that suspending Syria will not resolve the issue of the unrest there.
A wide-ranging tableau of violence and retributions on Wednesday reinforced the U.N.’s warnings.
A blast in central Damascus rattled — but did not injure — U.N. observers, followed by the airstrikes in Azaz.
And in tense Lebanon, a powerful Shiite clan that backs Assad said it abducted at least 20 Syrians in retaliation for rebels holding one of their relatives captive in Syria.
The rebels accuse the Lebanese man of belonging to Hezbollah, a Shiite Lebanese group allied with Syria and Iran.
The bombing of Azaz brought into stark relief the limits of the rebels’ expanding control of Syria’s north.
In recent months, rebels have pushed the Syrian army from a number of towns in a swath of territory south of the Turkish border and north of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city.
As the Assad regime’s grip on the ground slips, however, it is increasingly targeting rebel areas with attack helicopters and fighter jets — weapons the rebels can’t challenge.
There were fresh signs Wednesday that the civil war was spilling across the border into Lebanon, a country ravaged by its own 15-year civil war that Syria was deeply involved in, and which is sharply divided between supporters and opponents of Assad’s regime.
Syrian rebels have adopted a new tactic of seizing prisoners from countries or foreign groups allied with the regime to rattle Assad and his allies outside the country, such as the 11 Lebanese Shiites captured in May shortly after they crossed from Turkey on their way to Lebanon. Earlier this month, rebels abducted 48 Iranians near the capital, Damascus.
On Wednesday, Sunni power Saudi Arabia ordered its citizens to leave Lebanon, citing fear of kidnappings by Shiites angry over the rebels taking prisoners from Lebanon and Iran.
In Damascus, a bomb attached to a fuel truck exploded Wednesday outside a hotel where U.N. observers are staying, wounding at least three people, Syrian state TV reported.