DHAKA: Syria warplanes bombed the divided northern city of Aleppo, killing and wounding dozens of people December 22, while a car bomb in Homs killed at least eight, including six schoolchildren.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) meanwhile said half a million people across war-torn Syria are wounded, with many lacking access to basic healthcare and treatment.

Hundreds of people have been killed over the past week in Aleppo as Syrian aircraft have dropped crude barrel bombs on the country’s second city and onetime commercial hub, now largely reduced to rubble, according to activists, medics and other witnesses.
‘Dozens of people were killed or wounded’ when Syrian warplanes dropped barrel bombs near the Friday market in Aleppo on Sunday, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based group that relies on activists and other witnesses.

The group said separate attacks also targeted the rebel-held Sakhur, Ahmadiyeh, Baideen and Ard al-Hamra neighbourhoods of the city, which has been cleaved into regime- and rebel-held enclaves since the summer of 2012.

The Aleppo Media Centre, a network of citizen journalists on the ground, said the barrel bombs ‘destroyed a bus, leaving no survivors’, and demolished around 10 cars and a residential building.

It added that ‘hospitals are packed with wounded’, and said the number of dead could not yet be confirmed, as the bombing campaign continued into the afternoon.

BDST: 2014 HRS, DEC 22, 2013
Edited by Robab Rosan, Current Affairs Editor