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Airwars Assessment
(Previous Incident Codes: R802RS896)
A mother and four or more of her children were among those killed in an airstrike on Maarat al Numan, local media reported – the majority of sources blamed the Syrian regime for the attack, though some sources attributed the event to Russia.
The Shaam News Network blamed Moscow, reporting: “The city of Maarat al Numan was exposed to an aerial bombardment from warplanes firing several missiles at a residential area in Al Masri mosque street. Activists said the shelling caused the destruction of several houses over the heads of their inhabitants. Civil defense teams worked to lift the rubble. The searches exposed a terrible massacre against a whole family in which a mother was killed with her four children – in addition to two other martyrs. The civil defence managed to pull out a woman and several children alive from under the rubble and moved them to field hospitals.”
Other sources reported that “the Egyptian mosque” in Maarat al numan was struck.
According to the Syrian Human Rights Committee, “Civil defense teams spent three hours removing a girl from the rubble”. Other sources published images showing civilians being rescued in the aftermath of the event.
However, LCCSY, the Syrian Network for Human Rights, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and Baladi were among sources blaming regime warplanes.
According to SO4HR, seven died, including the woman and her five children.
Baladi put the number of children killed at five, with SN4HR said that six died.
@salqin tweeted that there had been “more than 50 martyrs and 100 wounded, most of them children and women, in bombings by the Russian Aviation in downtown Idlib city market and Maarat al Numan.”
Key Information
Geolocation Notes
Reports of the incident mention the city of Maarat al Numan (مَعَرَّة النُّعْمَان), for which the generic coordinates are: 35.647038, 36.679174. Due to limited satellite imagery and information available to Airwars, we were unable to verify the location further.