Airwars assessment
Three civilians including a child were reported killed and others injured in alleged Israeli airstrikes on Damascus countryside in Syria on April 27th, 2020, according to local media.
Euphrates Post said these airstrikes targeted sites for the Syrian regime, while @Step_Agency said that they targeted sites of Iranian militias in the vicinity of Sahnaya and Al Kiswah mountains in Damascus’ southwestern countryside. Nors for Studies said that Israeli warplanes targeted the area with eight raids.
The sources said the airstrikes also led to the killing of four people from foreign nationalities, believed to be part of the Iranian or Hezbollah forces.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported “Israeli airstrikes on Damascus countryside targeted locations and headquarters of the militias loyal to Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah in the area from Kiswa to Sahnaya in the southwestern countryside of Damascus, which led to the death of at least four of those forces, whose identity is unknown.”
The Syrian Observatory continues to say that “three civilians were killed and others were wounded as a result of shrapnel of missile fragments on their homes in the Adliya and Al-Hujaira regions of the southern countryside of Damascus.” The Observatory said that it is not known yet whether these shrapnel was caused by Israeli missiles, or by the air defense missiles of the Syrian regime.
From their side, Shaam Network blamed the Syrian regime for the death of the three civilians saying that they were killed by shrapnel from the regime’s air defense missiles used to respond to the Israeli attack. From their side, the Syrian regime denied this claim and blamed the Israelis.
Shaam Network said that footage of the regime’s response to the attack on social media shows that their missiles fell back to the ground and thus they are responsible for the civilians killed.
The incident occured around dawn.
Summary
Sources (9) [ collapse]
Media
from sources (3) [ collapse]
Geolocation notes (1) [ collapse]
Reports of the incident mention the area between Sahnaya (صحنايا) and the mountains in the vicinity of Al Kiswah (الكسوة). Due to limited satellite imagery and information available to Airwars, we were unable to verify the location further. The generic coordinates for a point between these two locations are: 33.393559, 36.229134.