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 opposition monitoring group said the deaths 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 in 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.
Syrian state television reported the blast was caused by a car bomb in the parking lot of al-Qardaha hospital.
The explosion was the first in al-Assad’s hometown in the four-year conflict.
The monitoring group said Saturday that it documented more than 30,000 civilians deaths and injuries in the past year. The Observatory has demanded that all parties in the conflict refrain from attacking civilian and densely-populated areas.
The Observatory said it has documented the deaths of 5,812 civilians, including 1,733 children and 969 women, during aerial and barrel bomb assaults.
Activists have blamed government forces for most of the aerial assaults and casualties.
The activist group also said 1,102 civilians, including 234 children and 133 women, were killed from mortar and tank shells, rockets, explosive propane gas cylinders and cannon shells launched by the Nusra Front, Jund al- Aqsa Organization, rebel and Islamic fighters in several Syrian provinces.
The Observatory said it is seeking the involvement of the United Nations Security Council and requesting a U.N. resolution that would allow for war crimes and other international criminal court charges in connection with the civilian deaths.
Syria’s civil war has been raging since 2011, when a government crackdown on protests in the city of 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, such as 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.
