Airstrikes thought to have been carried out by Russian jets on a rebel-held residential area in northwestern Syria have killed 44 civilians, a Britain-based monitor said on on Friday. Six children were among those killed when the strikes hit the Zardana area of Idlib province late yesterday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. The Russian defence ministry dismissed the Observatory’s reports of strikes on Zardana as having “nothing to do with reality”, in a statement carried by the TASS news agency.
Zardana is largely controlled by Islamist rebels, with a small presence of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham alliance led by Syria’s former al-Qaeda affiliate. An AFP correspondent at the scene saw volunteers with a crane still searching the rubble in the early morning.