In Homs, in western Syria, a drone attack by unknown assailants killed and injured scores of cadets, family members and others at a military academy graduation ceremony on Oct. 5. The Syrian military and Russian forces, which have been backing President Bashar al-Assad, retaliated by attacking at least 2,300 locations in the opposition-controlled northwest, with schools, hospitals, markets and camps for Syrians forced from their homes among them. Some 120,000 people — many of whom had already been displaced several times, including by the huge earthquake last February — were sent fleeing, and at least 500 civilians were injured or killed just in the incidents that our commission has tracked since October.
The weapons have included internationally prohibited cluster munitions — continuing devastating patterns that our commission has documented since Syria’s civil war began in 2011. In the past, these revelations produced widespread outrage. The difference now? The world’s attention is elsewhere.
ISIS is also stepping up its deadly activity inside Syria, attacking both civilian and military targets, continuing to demonstrate its operational capacity and extremist ideology.
Meanwhile in the northeast, Turkish forces have accelerated their operations against Syrian Democratic Forces, an opposition group it alleges has ties to terrorist activity on Turkish soil. That same opposition group has also been fighting local tribes in Deir al Zour, eastern Syria’s largest city, in a conflict fueled by longstanding grievances that the Kurdish-led local administration is failing to provide essential services or to secure basic rights. The civilian deaths that have ensued remain uncounted.
And most alarmingly, the heightened regional tensions arising from the Gaza onslaught has led to increased attacks on Syrian soil by Israel and by Iranian militias. U.S. bases in Syria have been attacked over 50 times by the militias since October. Well before the Jan. 28 attack in Jordan that killed three American service members, the United States has conducted retaliatory strikes on facilities reportedly used by Iran-linked groups, and the killings in Jordan have led to a new spate of American retaliatory attacks in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, creating fears of a wider conflict. Meanwhile, Israeli airstrikes, ostensibly aimed at Iranian-linked assets, have repeatedly put Syria’s civilian airports, urgently needed for deliveries of humanitarian aid, out of commission.