Syria Feature: Regime Attacks Deliberately Target Civilians, Killing 1000s

Raw footage from the Human Rights Watch investigation:

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EA Worldview asked the report's co-author Ole Solvang, who is on the ground in Syria, whether insurgents had been present at any of the sites of airstrikes in which civilians died.

Solvang told us that while there had been some airstrikes targeting opposition fighters, those attacks did not result in the deaths of civilians. According to Solvang, such strikes were extremely rare compared to those attacks on non-combatants: "We did not document any attacks where we concluded that civilian casualties were collateral damage in the sense that they were lawful. In virtually all cases we documented the strikes did not hit any legitimate targets."

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Syria 1st-Hand: Darayya After the Mass Killing --- "The Stink of Death" (Di Giovanni)

A funeral procession in Darayya in August, days before the deadly regime attacks

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Two weeks on, Darayya still stinks of death. A poor Sunni suburb south of Damascus, it had been well known for furniture-making, and for its peaceful resistance before the conflict. Now it is a ghost town of shattered glass and broken graveyard walls, bombed vegetable shops and decapitated blocks of flats. Rank rubbish is piled on corners, uncollected. There is the unmistakable smell of rotting corpses that have not yet been removed from houses. A lone bicyclist makes his way awkwardly through the rubble and debris.

The town is still and lifeless.

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