Mick Hartley

Understandably perhaps, Russian brutality in Ukraine has taken the spotlight off its equally brutal role in Syria, but the attacks on Syrian civilians – and refugee camps – continue. 

Russian jets bombed camps near Syria's northwestern city of Idlib on Sunday, killing at least nine civilians in a flare-up of attacks on the last opposition-held bastion, witnesses and rescuers said.

War planes flying at high altitude, aided by Syrian army artillery, also dropped bombs on forests near the makeshift camps west of Idlib, witnesses said.

No immediate comment was available from Russia or its allies in the Syrian army, which says it targets the hideouts of insurgent groups and denies attacking civilians.

The opposition civil defence service said three children and a woman were among those killed in the strikes on the crowded camps where more than 70 people were wounded and rushed to field hospitals.

"There are no military bases or warehouses or rebel barracks here. Only civilians," Seraj Ibrahim, a rescuer with the Western-backed White Helmets organization, said when reached by phone.

More than 4 million people live in the densely populated opposition-held northwest area along the Turkish border. Most of them were driven there by successive Russian-led campaigns that regained territory seized by rebels.

James Snell in the Spectator:

This is a transparent war crime, with no military purpose. The locations of the camps, which are home to thousands of vulnerable people, are well known. The attacks against these nine camps were spread over a wide area and clearly co-ordinated. Footage of some of the attacks has led to speculation that banned munitions, including cluster bombs, were deployed.

This is a reminder of the constant, unceasing brutality of Syria’s war, which is continuing without respite. It is also a rebuke to those European countries that declare northern Syria to be safe as a fig-leaf to cover their own deportations of Syrians. It is also a rebuke to Turkish attempts to deport as many Syrian refugees as possible there. (One of those killed was recently returned from Turkey.) 

This attack is a reflection of something nastier and more pervasive too, which we see in Russian tactics in its imperial war in Ukraine. An element of sadistic premeditation, wrapped in the false attribution – in advance – of one’s own war crimes to others. 

A day or so before the attack, Russia’s Major General Oleg Yegorov told Russia’s state media that Moscow had information that Syrian terrorists planned to film staged footage in the Idlib province in order to accuse Syrian authorities and Russian forces of conducting strikes on civilians.

Russia’s media suggested that militants, as well as what it called ‘the ‘White Helmets’ pseudo-humanitarian organisation…plan to carry out provocations in the Idlib province’.

Such reports appear to be part of an old trend, an artefact of the long Russian history of lying in advance about atrocities it has knowledge of before they happen. The strategy is simple: deny an atrocity, or attribute it to others, then put the horror into practice on schedule.  

Of course, Russia also frequently predicts things which never materialise. In its fight with Ukraine, Russia has warned of the bombings of atomic power plants, the destruction of dams and the flooding of low-lying cities, chemical attacks by the dozen, and more. These things have not happened – yet. 

So we must still be careful. ‘Never believe anything until the Kremlin denies it’ may be an easy rule of thumb – but the reality is crueller and muddier.