Russian warplanes on Sunday carried out a massacre in the village of Burj Qai, Homs province, striking civilian homes with a number of air raids, killing eight and injuring dozens.
The attack came one day after the Assad regime announced a three-day extension of the ‘regime of silence’ ceasefire truce, which coincided with the start of Eid and ended on Saturday.
Al-Souria Net’s correspondent said that civil defense members had removed eight bodies from beneath the rubble of their homes in addition to 10 wounded people. Victims were trapped for long periods due to the size of the explosion and the damage to the houses.
He added that an entire family was among those killed, including a father, mother and their two children, while most of the wounded were in a critical condition, meaning the number of dead was likely to increase.
Our correspondent noted that, “While the members of the civil defense extracted the martyrs and wounded, regime forces concentrated in loyalist villages hit the area struck by the warplanes with cluster munitions, which wounded three people.”
According to a source, these raids were an act of “revenge taken against civilians after the regime forces failed to advance on the Al-Zahra fronts and a psychological war in the village of Ghajar in the Hama countryside, where opposition forces succeeding in repulsing the regime and inflicting heavy losses on troops and equipment.”
He said that regime loyalist pages reported that the Russian warplanes had targeted Nusra Front bases and armed opposition positions, which is contradicted by information provided by our correspondent.
This article was translated and edited by The Syrian Observer. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.
