‘My children are gone’, cries father as Russian air strike on Syria kills at least 7
- ‘The dearest people to my heart are gone,’ said Ayhman Mozan, breaking down in tears after losing all four of his children in the attack that destroyed his home
- Syria’s war, which erupted in 2011, has killed nearly half a million people and forced about half of the country’s pre-war population from their homes
A Russian air strike killed seven people, four of them children, in Syria’s rebel-held Idlib region on Friday, a war monitor said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the deaths “including four children who are siblings, two men and an unidentified person … as a result of Russian air strikes”, in the Jisr al-Shughur countryside of northern Syria.
Ayhman Mozan, 31, lost all four of his children in the attack that destroyed his home. “My children are gone … the dearest people to my heart are gone,” he said, breaking down in tears as he called out his children’s names.
He and his family were sleeping when the first strike hit their home, he said, lying in a hospital bed in the border city of Darkush. He helped rescue his wife from under the rubble but when he looked for his children, he could not find them.
The house has been completely destroyed, he told a correspondent at the site of the attack said, with toys, furniture and clothing scattered across the rubble. The children killed were all under 10 years old, said Rami Abdel Rahman, who heads the British-based Observatory.