• The Idlib region is home to nearly three million people
• Syria’s war has killed around half a million people since starting in 2011

KANSAFRA: Syria regime shelling has killed eight children and a woman in the country’s last major rebel bastion of Idlib in just two days, a war monitor said Friday.

Artillery fire early Friday morning on the village of Kansafra in the northwestern stronghold killed four children from the same family, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

An AFP correspondent saw the father cry over the bodies of three of the children at a cemetery. The remains of a fourth were then brought along, and buried in haste as shelling started up again in a neighboring area.

A day earlier, in the nearby village of Balshun, artillery fire by pro-Damascus forces killed four children and the mother of three of them, the Observatory reported.

The Idlib region is home to nearly three million people, two-thirds of them displaced from other parts of the country during the decade-long civil war.

It is dominated by Syria’s former Al-Qaeda affiliate, but rebels and other jihadists are also present.

A cease-fire deal brokered by regime ally Russia and rebel backer Turkey has largely protected the region from a new government military offensive since March 2020.

But regime forces have stepped up their shelling on the southern edges of the bastion since June.

Syrian President Bashar Assad took the oath of office for a new term last month, vowing to make “liberating those parts of the homeland that still need to be” one of his top priorities.

Syria’s war has killed around half a million people since starting in 2011 with a brutal crackdown on anti-government protests.

AFP