Aleppo City Bus Shelled in Northern Syria
Ten civilians were killed when a shell from a regime air strike hit a city bus in Aleppo, as the city reels from a two-week barrel bomb campaign that has left more than 500 dead.
“Half obscured by smoke and dust, a man in a video brandished a milk crate loaded with what he said were fragments of human flesh: the remains of people torn apart,” reports the New York Times.
“‘Look, look, Bashar, they are humans, they are civilians,’ the man shouted as others searched for more remains among the oranges stacked in a neat pyramid on a nearby cart — a grim end to a year of civil war in which the number of Syrian refugees quintupled and the death toll doubled.
“The explosion in the Tariq al-Bab area of Aleppo, which antigovernment activists said had killed at least 10 people, occurred not far from a market that was hit on Saturday. A second shell landed nearby as people tried to take the victims to hospitals, the activists said.”
Monitoring Group Says Syrian Death Toll Passes 130,000
Reuters reports that the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says the death toll in the Syrian conflict has risen to at least 130,433, more than a third of them civilians.
The Observatory “put the number of women and children killed in the conflict so far at 11,709. It said the death toll among rebels fighting the Assad government was at least 29,083. Deaths among the Syrian armed forces and fighters supporting Assad were at least 52,290, including 262 fighters from the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah and 286 from other non-Syrian Shiite groups.”
It also said that “at least 17,000 people are being held in government prisons while more than 6,000 government supporters are in the custody of Islamist rebels. It said the actual number of people killed and imprisoned is likely to be at least 50,000 higher, but said it could not verify those cases because the identities of the victims were hidden or missing.”
Conflict In Cyberspace Complements Ground War
NPR’s “All Things Considered” reports on a Syrian cyberwar that is “raging online. While the rebels have gone online to recruit fighters and coordinate with allies, forces supporting Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s regime have employed malware to infiltrate and track them.”
The transcript of the program is comprehensive and well worth a read.
“We’ve seen fake documents which purported to be pertaining to the formation of a revolutionary high council for after the war. However, opening would actually install the type of implant software that I described to you earlier.
“There was a case of Aburan Galyun(ph) who, at the time, was the head of the Transnational Syrian Opposition, his Facebook page was compromised,” cyber expert Morgan Marquis-Bloire tells host Robert Siegel.
“And so it appeared that he was giving advice to people to install the software. While people have become increasingly more knowledgeable of the risks posed by these types of attacks, the game has escalated and the attackers have become comparably trickier and more aggressive.”
Suggested Reads from Our Editorial Team:
Guardian: Syria Conflict Pits Shia Against Sunni as Hezbollah Says This is ‘War We Must Win’
NY Times: Syria’s Raging Health Crisis
Foreign Policy: The Islamist Enemy of Our Islamist Enemy