MOSCOW: The Russian military said its planes had not taken part in the Syrian regime’s assault in Eastern Ghouta where a monitoring group says airstrikes killed 80 civilians in rebel-held zones on Friday.
“The claims of the SOHR (Syrian Observatory of Human Rights)... on the so-called Russian strikes in Eastern Ghouta are only one more piece of ‘fake’ (news),” Russia’s defense ministry said, according to news agencies.
“Russian aviation has no military mission in Eastern Ghouta and has not undertaken any” in this region, it added.
The British-based Observatory, which says it determines whose planes carry out raids according to type, location, flight patterns and munitions used, said at least 76 civilians were killed in Russian air strikes on the southwestern Ghouta pocket on Friday.
A month-long government offensive on the rebel-held enclave on the outskirts of Damascus has killed at least 1,346 civilians, according to the Observatory, despite a United Nations cease-fire calling for an end to the onslaught.
Meanwhile, thousands of civilians poured out of Eastern Ghouta on Thursday after a month-long bombardment brought the Syrian regime closer to recapturing the devastated rebel enclave close to Damascus. UN special envoy to Syria Staffane De Mistura said that UN teams were not coordination the civilian evacuation from eastern Ghouta towns.
Defying expectations and calls to step down, Syria’s President Bashar Assad was strengthening his grip on power as the conflict entered its eighth year.
His troops advanced in a ferocious assault on Ghouta, once the opposition’s main bastion on the outskirts of the capital.
A war monitor said regime forces now control 70 percent of the area, splitting the remaining rebel territory into three shrinking pockets.
After a fierce air and ground assault, regime forces on Thursday captured Hammuriyeh town, in an isolated southern part of Ghouta.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor, said rebels later launched a counter-attack and regained parts of the town, killing 14 regime fighters.
Elsewhere, however, it said the regime overran Al-Rihan town in an assault led by Russian officers and advisers.
The regime’s advance into Hammuriyeh had punched a corridor through the town into government-controlled territory.
Streams of women and children escaped through that corridor on Thursday, carrying plastic bags stuffed with clothes and pushing strollers piled high with suitcases and rugs.
They reached a regime checkpoint in Adra district, where ambulances and large green buses waited to take them to temporary shelters.
The Observatory said nearly 20,000 people fled the enclave in 24 hours before the flow stopped on Thursday evening.
It called the exodus “the largest displacement since the beginning of the assault on Ghouta.”
The United Nations said it was trying to determine how many people have left the enclave.
