- Russia launched strikes in support of President Bashar Assad’s regime in September 2015
- Russian air forces have carried out more than 40,000 bombing missions, hitting about 120,000 targets
MOSCOW: Russia’s defense minister said Saturday that almost
88,000 rebels had been killed in Syria in the three years since Moscow’s intervention to back government forces.
“Over the course of the operation, a total of more than 87,500 rebels have been eliminated, 1,411 settlements have been liberated and more than 95 percent of Syria’s territory,” Shoigu was quoted as saying at a forum in Singapore in a ministry statement.
“Most of the rebels have been liquidated,” Shoigu said.
Britain-based war monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says close to 365,000 people have been killed during the seven-year civil war.
Russia launched strikes in support of President Bashar Assad’s regime in September 2015.
Russian air forces have carried out more than 40,000 bombing missions, hitting about 120,000 targets of “terrorist” infrastructure, Shoigu said.
The defense minister said that “Syrian armed forces currently control territory where more than 90 percent of the population lives.”
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32 civilians killed in coalition strikes in east Syria: monitor
US-backed forces are pictured near the village of Susah in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor, near the Syrian border with Iraq. (File photo / AFP)
BEIRUT: Air strikes by the US-led coalition fighting Daesh in eastern Syria have killed at least 32 civilians in less than 24 hours, a monitor said Friday.
Strikes on the village of Sousa killed 18 civilians including seven children late Thursday and 14 more civilians on Friday, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Dozens were wounded and many remained under the rubble in the village in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor near the Iraqi border, Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said.
Nine Daesh fighters also lost their lives in the raids, he said.
A coalition spokesman was not immediately available for comment.
Daesh overran large swathes of Syria and neighboring Iraq in 2014, proclaiming a “caliphate” in land it controlled.
But the militant group has since lost most of it to various offensives in both countries.
In Syria, the group has seen its presence reduced to parts of the vast Badia desert and a pocket in Deir Ezzor that includes Sousa.
A Kurdish-Arab alliance backed by the coalition last month launched an offensive to wrest the Deir Ezzor pocket from Daesh.
The Syrian Democratic Forces has said the battle will likely take longer than expected.
Since 2014 the US-led coalition has acknowledged direct responsibility for more than 1,100 civilian deaths in Syria and Iraq, but rights groups put the number killed much higher.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says coalition strikes in Syria alone have killed more than 3,300 civilians.
Syria’s war has killed more than 360,000 people since it erupted in 2011 with the brutal repression of anti-government protests.