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Air strike kills 16 near Damascus

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BEIRUT: At least 16 civilians were killed and dozens wounded on Saturday in an air strike on a rebel-held area outside Damascus, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said.


It said it was not immediately clear who was responsible for the strike on the town Hammuriyeh in the opposition bastion of Eastern Ghouta, which has been targeted by both the government and its ally Russia in the past.


“Sixteen civilians, including a child, were killed and around 50 others wounded in an air strike on the main street in the town of Hammuriyeh,” Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman said.


He could not immediately confirm if all the wounded were civilians, or if some were rebel fighters.


An AFP photographer saw members of the White Helmets rescue organisation removing survivors from the aftermath of the street, including a man whose face was coated in blood.


Other White Helmet volunteers sprayed water from hoses onto smoking rubble including overturned and mangled cars.


Elsewhere, a man carried two children, a girl in yellow fluffy pyjamas, her hair stiff with dust, and a smaller child whose head was haphazardly bandaged.


Another carried the lifeless body of a child. The Eastern Ghouta region outside Damascus has been under a devastating government siege since 2012, and is also the regular target of regime air strikes and artillery fire.


It is the last remaining opposition stronghold near Damascus, where a string of local “reconciliation deals” have seen villages and towns brought back under the control of President Bashar al Assad’s government.


Meanwhile, a senior official and a war monitor said on Saturday that the second phase of an evacuation of rebels in Homs as part of a deal to surrender the city’s last


insurgent pocket of Al Waer to the government has been delayed until Monday.


Homs Province governor Talal Barazi was cited by city officials in a message to Reuters as saying the operation would continue on Monday after having earlier said it would go ahead as planned on Saturday. — AFP/Reuters


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