At least 49 people, including 10 children and five women, were killed this week by Syrian government forces in a village north of Aleppo, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Saturday.
The monitoring ground said the slayings in the village of Retian on Tuesday included 13 rebels with their families — most killed in their homes without resistance. The forces were identified by the group as fighters backed by Hezbollah and non-Syrian fighters.
In addition, at least four people — including two women and two soldiers — were killed and others injured during an explosion in the city of al-Qardaha in Lattakia province, the birthplace of President Bashar al-Assad, the London-based monitoring group said Saturday.
The explosion was the first in al-Assad’s hometown in the four-year conflict.
Syria’s civil war has been raging since 2011, when a government crackdown on protests in Daraa spiraled into a full-blown armed conflict.
Few areas have been spared by gunfire, bombing, airstrikes, even reported chemical attacks. The violence comes not just from troops loyal to al-Assad — who has been criticized and isolated by much of the world — but a number of rebel groups, some of them considered moderates and others extremists, like the al Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra Front and ISIS.
The impact on civilians has been horrific. Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations special envoy for Syria, reported in January that some 220,000 people had been killed and 1 million wounded.
Some 7.6 million have been displaced because of the fighting, with the return of polio, typhoid and measles to Syria symptomatic of the health crisis there.
The war has also produced 3.3 million refugees, most of whom ended up in camps in Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan.
