Russian Regime’s Violations Amount to War Crimes
I- Introduction and Methodology:
On 30 September 2015, Russian forces commenced air strikes on Syria and announced that it will target extremist Islamic groups and therefore joined the major conflict parties in Syria. SNHR previously issued two reports that documented the violations that were committed by the Russian forces through random and indiscriminate shelling and targeting pure civilian targets thus the material and human loss was great due to these attacks. In this report we document the use of phosphorous bombs by the Russian forces.
Our team conducted interviews and investigations with residents, local activists and eyewitnesses; in addition we included three of the interviews in this report. We analyzed footages and images we received and crossed referenced these outcomes with information about the air strikes from pro-Russian media outlets. All eyewitnesses spoke in Arabic as we also explained the aim behind conducting these interviews where some of them preferred their real names to be kept confidential, as we also kept a record for all the contact details to all eyewitnesses.
Unfortunately, after four continuous years of daily shelling and bombardment, Syrians are able to differentiate between the Russian and Syrian regime shelling. These airstrikes target, to a large degree, 85% of regions under the control of armed opposition while it targets 15% of regions under ISIL’s control.