Russia: Aleppo school bombing photos were fake, ‘no casualties’

Syrian government forces launched a counteroffensive Saturday under the cover of airstrikes in an attempt to regain control of areas they had lost to insurgents the day before in the northern city of Aleppo, activists and state media said.

Meanwhile, insurgents launched a fresh offensive on the city, a day after embarking on a broad ground attack aimed at breaking a weeks-long government siege on the eastern rebel-held neighborhoods of Syria’s largest city.
The insurgents were able to capture much of the western neighborhood of Assad where much of Saturday’s fighting was concentrated, according to the Syrian Army and the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The Observatory said the new offensive by Syrian troops and their allies was ongoing under the cover of Russian and Syrian airstrikes. The group said the fighting and airstrikes are mostly on Aleppo’s western and southern edges.
The Syrian Army command said troops and their allies are pounding insurgent positions with artillery shells and rockets adding that “all kinds of weapons” are being used in the fighting in the Assad neighborhood.
The Aleppo Media Center, an activist collective, reported airstrikes and artillery shelling of areas near Aleppo.
Later Saturday, the rebels said they launched an attack on the Zahraa neighborhood in western Aleppo to try and capture it from government forces. The attack began with a massive explosion that struck government positions on the front line, said Yasser Al-Yousef of the Nour El-Din El-Zinki group, a main faction in Aleppo.
A reporter inside the city for the Lebanon-based Al-Mayadeen TV channel confirmed that the rebels have attacked the Zahraa neighborhood. As he spoke from the roof of a building, sounds of heavy exchange of gunfire could be heard in the background.
The Syrian Army said troops are repelling the attack on Zahraa. It said the offensive began when the insurgents detonated a vehicle and shelled the area.
Syrian state media said rebels shelled government-held western neighborhoods of Aleppo on Saturday morning wounding at least 10 people, including a young girl.
Rebel shelling of Aleppo on Friday killed 15 and wounded more than 100.
On Friday, insurgents including members of Fatah Al-Sham and the Ajnad Al-Sham and Ahrar Al-Sham militias took advantage of cloudy and rainy weather to attack government positions. On Saturday the weather was better, according to residents.
“There are ongoing clashes,” said opposition activist Baraa Al-Halaby by telephone from besieged east Aleppo, adding that the fighting is far from them but explosions could be clearly heard in the city.
East Aleppo has been subjected to a ferocious campaign of aerial attacks by Russian and Syrian government warplanes, and hundreds of people have been killed in recent weeks, according to opposition activists and trapped residents.
The new offensive by insurgents is the second attempt to break the government’s siege of Aleppo’s opposition-held eastern districts, where the UN estimates 275,000 people are trapped.
UN Special Envoy Staffan De Mistura has estimated 8,000 of them are rebel fighters, and no more than 900 of them affiliated with Fatah Al-Sham. Syrian and Russian officials have said that no cease-fire is possible as long as Fatah Al-Sham remains allied and intertwined with other rebel forces.
Aleppo is the current focal point of the war. President Bashar Assad has said he is determined to retake the country’s largest city and former commercial capital.
Meanwhile, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman on Friday said an expert examination of pictures showing a strike on a Syrian school that UNICEF said killed 22 children, had shown they were fake.
“Today after expert analysis of photographs from the Syrian village of Hass, it turned out that there was no strike on the school and there were no victims either,” Maria Zakharova wrote on Facebook.
“The photographs are computer graphics,” she said, without giving any details.
Airstrikes on a school in Hass village in Syria’s rebel-held Idlib province killed 22 children and six teachers, the UN children’s agency UNICEF said on Wednesday.
Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said Thursday that photographs taken by a Russian drone showed that the roof of the school reportedly hit in the strikes showed no damage and that there were no craters attributable to bombs in the area. And he said that “not one Russian warplane entered that area” on that day. “This is an absolute fact.”
Zakharova had on Thursday initially described the attack as a “terrible tragedy,” while insisting that reports of Russian involvement were untrue after the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the strikes were carried out by “warplanes — either Russian or Syrian.”
Syrian government forces and their Russian allies have been accused by Western powers and rights groups of carrying out indiscriminate attacks on civilian infrastructure.

Source: Arab News