Human Rights Watch investigators who visited Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, have concluded that the Syrian government fired at least four ballistic missiles into civilian neighborhoods there last week, killing more than 141 people, including 71 children. As my colleague Anne Barnard explained, the rights group released details of the four documented strikes, and video of aftermath of one attack, on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, opposition activists added Engish subtitles to an emotional account of the devastation caused by one missile strike on Aleppo from a young boy who said he survived the bombing, but lost several family members and neighbors.
The original interview with the boy was posted on YouTube on Monday by Orient News, a private Syrian satellite channel that began broadcasting from Dubai before the anti-government uprising began. Within a week of the first protests in Syria, Ghassan Abboud, the Syrian businessman who owns the channel, told a Saudi broadcaster that senior government officials had threatened to kidnap his journalists if they did not stop covering demonstrations against President Bashar al-Assad.
The boy’s testimony was subtitled by the ANA New Media Association, a group of opposition video activists led by Rami Jarrah, who blogs as Alexander Page.
The new reports come weeks after experts told The Lede that video of a huge explosion at Aleppo University last month suggested that the campus had been hit by a ballistic missile.
When Liz Sly of the Washington Post visited Aleppo’s Ard al-Hamra neighborhood after two missile strikes, residents gave similarly graphic accounts of pulling the mangled bodies of victims from wrecked buildings. The scenes of devastation, she wrote, “more closely resembling those of an earthquake, with homes pulverized beyond recognition, people torn to shreds in an instant and what had once been thriving communities reduced to mountains of rubble.â€
Ole Solvang, a Human Rights Watch researcher who helped document the damage in Aleppo, drew attention to video posted online by opposition activists, said to show the desperate search for survivors in the immediate aftermath of the strike on Ard al-Hamra.
As Mr. Solvang assessed the wreckage in person on Thursday and Friday, he described the damage to the Aleppo and a neighboring town in words and images posted on Twitter.
Late Tuesday, an Aleppo blogger who supported the uprising but has been critical of the armed rebellion on his @edwardedark Twitter feed, reported that another huge blast shook the city.
Ms. Sly reported on Twitter Wednesday night that two more missiles were fired at rural Aleppo. “They landed in fields,†she observed. “That’s how accurate they are. Seems a bit pointless.â€
Late Wednesday, Mr. Solvang pointed to video posted on YouTube by opposition activists, showing what they said were distant images of a missile being launched from Damascus in the direction of Aleppo.
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