In War-Torn Syria, Tactic of Targeting Civilians Is on the Rise
In War-Torn Syria, Tactic of Targeting Civilians Is on the Rise
The tactic employed increasingly in the Syrian conflict is particularly heinous and craven: Watch for shuttered bakeries in conflict-torn towns to reopen after receiving shipments of flour, and when the bread lines of the desperately hungry form, attack.
That scenario was repeated Sunday, in the Syrian town of Halfaya in the rebel-stronghold province of Hama, when a reopened bakery that had attracted hundreds of people seeking bread was bombed by government warplanes, according to news reports quoting local residents. Such attacks on spots that attract large numbers of civilians, such as bakeries, are a war crime under the 1949 Geneva Convention. Hundreds of Syrians have died in such attacks in a brutal civil war that has claimed more than 40,000 lives since early 2011, mostly civilians.
But it was not apparent that the United Nations-Arab League envoy on the Syrian crisis, Lakhdar Brahimi, brought up the Halfaya attack or the tactic of bread-line targeting when he met Monday with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus.