Amnesty: Russian bombing of Syria may be a war crime

Amnesty International released a report Tuesday saying the airstrikes have hit homes and hospitals, killing at least 200 civilians in Homs, Idlib and Aleppo provinces.

Amnesty’s 28-page report includes analyses of 25 suspected Russian air strikes in Syria since 30 September, and includes a range of interviews with people who witnessed the attacks.

“In others, they seem to have attacked military objectives and civilian objects without distinction, or caused disproportionate harm to civilians when striking military targets”.

Russia’s Defense Ministry is dismissing a new report from Amnesty International about “possible war crimes” in their air campaign in Syria, denying the use of cluster munitions in the war and insisting the other claims are “nothing new”. Each cluster bomb scatters scores of bomblets over an area the size of a football pitch. The think tank found that ninety-percent of Russian air strikes have not targeted the Islamic State.

Amnesty said that Russian bombers targeted residential areas and killed 119 civilians in five of the attacks it studied.

Each such vehicle is a tactical unit and considered a legitimate military target in accordance with the US Army classification, Konashenkov said.

Some of the attacks “may amount to war crimes”, one Amnesty official said. “They must halt all use of cluster munitions and stop dropping unguided bombs on civilian areas”, said Philip Luther.

Fixed-wing military aircraft based primarily at the Hmaymim air base in Latakia governorate have since then carried out thousands of sorties across the country and attacked thousands of locations that Russian Federation has described as “terrorist” targets.

A spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin said the government hadn’t seen the report but would look into it.

Kristyan Benedict, Amnesty International UK’s Syria campaign manager, said: “It increasingly looks as if Russian Federation is trying to obscure the deadly truth over its Syrian bombing campaign”.

Igor Konashenkov, a spokesman for the Russian Defence Ministry, said the report contained “fake information”.

In one attack on October 15, near Homs, at least 46 civilians who were sheltering in a building basement were killed, Amnesty said.

The Kremlin doesn’t have information about any such incidents or the “reliability of the data cited by Amnesty International”, Peskov told reporters Wednesday on a conference call.