(Previous Incident Codes: R3876a RS4104 )

At least one woman was killed and seven other civilians, including two medical personnel, were injured in alleged Russian artillery shelling on Maarat al-Nu`man’s primary healthcare facility, south of Idlib, on October 3rd, 2019 according to a local source and Human Rights Watch.

Human Rights Watch published a report on the incident: “the facility’s director, Mahmoud al-Mur, said that on October 3, 2019 at 12:15 p.m., several artillery shells hit the main road to the facility and then three shells hit the western walls of the compound housing the facility, from the south.”

The facility director al-Mur also reported that 80 patients were in the reception area at the time. The shelling wounded eight people, including a doctor “who sustained a metal fragment to his foot” and a woman who was critically wounded in her abdomen and later died. The shelling also caused damage to the “dental clinic and the facility’s pharmacy, some laboratory equipment, the solar energy system, and water containers, and damaged 10 neighboring residential buildings, blowing out their windows and doors and collapsing some outer walls.” The hospital was closed for one week following the attack and patients had to travel three km further to another hospital.

Hussein Bayur, an SCD media officer, stated that “the road was being shelled and so for about 10 minutes after the facility was hit, we could not get there.”

Al-Mur and Bayur both reported that they “knew of no military objectives in the vicinity before or at the time of the attack, nor were there signs of military weapons, equipment, or personnel.”

According to a tweet from @NeSyria, “several civilian casualties, including a doctor and a nurse, after the Russian militia targeted the vicinity of the health center in the city of “Maarat al-Numan”, south of Idlib, with heavy artillery.”