Aleppo city was, over the past few months, a subject of a heavy barrel bombs shelling especially on Aleppo and its countryside.These air strikes were before and during Geneva 2 conference where the deputy foreign minister Faisal Al-Meqdad stated that the regime is using barrel bombs in order to protect civilians, despite the fact that these strikes were indiscriminate on the residential areas and the most crowded places, which led to huge numbers of casualties and wounded in a few weeks, in addition to destroying a large section of Aleppo city and displacing tens of thousands of the residents to the Turkish borders. Furthermore, the hospitals and medical staffs were overwhelmed and incapable of meeting these arising and horrible needs to contain the damage in what looks like a plan to forcibly evacuate the city of its residents, causing damage to the city facilities as much as possible, and killing as many victims as possible,especially among the civilians. These air strikes are just a continuation of this humanitarian tragedy that the Syrian people are experiencing, not to mention that it killed the possibility of a political solution and contributed even more in confirming the path of violence as a sustainable reality.
This report looks on the use of barrel bombs by the Syrian regime’s warplanes against Aleppo and its countryside from 28/1/2014 until 14/2/2014, documents the magnitude of destruction and casualtiesand evaluates the percentage of the civilians, women, and rebels of those victims.
The Syrian regime’s airplanes has dropped no less than 508 barrel bombs that contain explosive substances that killed more than 843 people including only six rebels and 837 civilians in 18 days.This suggests that 99% of the victims were civilians. Also these air strikes caused 326 injuries and more than 175000 left Aleppo due to the destruction of their houses and their fear of getting killed every day.
After three months of air strikes in addition to the attacks in the past years, quarter of Aleppo was severely destroyed or damaged (Please see several reports by the SNHR about the destruction of Aleppo that was caused by missiles and barrel bombs).
Among the civilians there were 221 children and 119 women (26% children and 14% women, all-together children and women represented 40% of the total victims) who got killed by the air strikes and barrel bombs against several neighborhoods in Aleppo and its countryside in 18 days according to what the SNHR documented from 28/1/2014 until 14/2/2014.
There were four days with more than 90 victims which were the bloodiest given the substantial increase in the casualties numbers (Saturday 1/2/2014, Sunday 2/2/2014, Saturday 8/2/2014, and Sunday 9/2/2014).