Syria army shells rebel bastion, killing seven: monitor

A shepherd carries a sheep at a livestock market in the Syrian town of Jibrin in Aleppo's eastern province on July 19, 2021, ahead of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha. (AFP)

• The army has stepped up its bombing of the northwestern enclave since Saturday

BEIRUT: The Syrian army shelled the Idlib region Thursday killing seven civilians, three of them children, in its third deadly bombardment of the rebel bastion in a week, a monitor said.
Several people were seriously wounded in the morning bombardment of the village of Iblin, south of Idlib, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The army has stepped up its bombing of the northwestern enclave since Saturday when President Bashar Assad took the oath of office for a new term vowing to make “liberating those parts of the homeland that still need to be” one of his top priorities.
The same day strikes on the Idlib villages of Sarja and Ehsin killed 14 civilians, seven of them children.
Two days earlier shelling of Idlib and the town of Fuaa further north killed nine civilians, three of them children, the Observatory said.
Controlled by an alliance dominated by Al-Qaeda’s former Syria affiliate, the Idlib region is home to nearly three million people, two-thirds of them displaced from other parts of the country.
A March 2020 deal brokered by the rival sides’ main foreign backers Russia and Turkey has eased fighting on the front line but the region remains in the government’s sights.
Elsewhere in the country, Kurdish-led forces control a large swathe of the east after expelling the Daesh group from the region.
And Turkey and its Syrian proxies hold a long strip of territory along the northern border.