At least 13 people, including children, were killed in Russian airstrikes on an area controlled by jihadists and rebels in northwestern Syria on Sunday, an NGO said, the deadliest such raid so far this year in the war-torn country, according to the same source.

Nine civilians, including two children, were killed in the raids in Idlib province, particularly when bombs fell on a vegetable market in its capital of the same name, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Another four were killed in another shelling, near Idlib, according to the same source.

“These Russian airstrikes are the deadliest in Syria this year and are a massacre,” Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the non-governmental organization based in Britain, told AFP.

Forces of Russia, an ally of the Syrian regime, carried out bombings in Idlib in retaliation for rebel UAV attacks that killed four civilians, including two children, last week, Mr. Abdel Rahman said.

Yesterday “six civilians were killed in Jisr al-Sugur and three rebel fighters were killed a short distance away by Russian airstrikes,” added the director of the NGO, which relies on a wide network of sources in Syria.

An AFP journalist on the ground saw plumes of smoke rising in the area of ​​the bombings and ambulances transporting wounded people from the market.

Ahmed Yazighi, a member of the so-called civil defense in the rebel-held city of Jisr al-Sugur, said nine people were killed, without specifying whether they were militants.

He complained that the attack was “directly against the public market, a source of necessary income for farmers”.

“Indescribable”

Saad Fatto, a 35-year-old land worker who survived the bombing, said he spent the morning transporting wounded.

“The Russian bombings happened while I was carrying tomatoes,” he characteristically said.

“It is indescribable, we had dead, injured, entrails [θυμάτων]”, he described, his hands stained with the blood of the people he tried to save.

A civilian, a fighter of the Islamic Turkestan Party (IKT) and two of the latter’s children were killed in the strike near Idlib, according to Mr. Abdel Rahman.

Members of the IKT, mainly from China’s Uyghur Muslim minority, went to Syria in 2011 to fight in the ranks of jihadist organizations, including Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the former arm of al-Qaeda in Syria, which controls most of Idlib.

At least 30 other civilians were injured by the Russian shelling, according to Mr. Abdel Rahman, who pointed out that this count is only preliminary.

“Special Enterprises”

Last night, the Syrian Ministry of Defense said that “in response to attacks (…) in recent days in the provinces of Hama and Latakia, which claimed the lives of civilians”, the armed forces conducted “special operations in coordination with the Russian air forces”.

These operations targeted “terrorist positions” in Idlib province and resulted in the killing of “dozens” of them and the destruction of caches of weapons and remote-controlled drones, the Defense Ministry added in a press release carried by Syria’s official SANA news agency.

Russia, the main backer of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, intervened in 2015 in the war that broke out in Syria in 2011.

With the support of the Russian army, Iranian forces and pro-Iranian factions, Damascus has recaptured most of the territory it had lost in the war.

The last major enclave of the armed opposition includes huge sectors of Idlib province (west) and some parts of the neighboring provinces of Aleppo, Hama and Lattakia. Some 4 million people live in this area, among them many internally displaced people who fled from other areas under the control of the anti-regime.

HTS is the largest organization operating in the region. However, other, less powerful jihadist and insurgent factions, more or less supported by Turkey, are also present. According to diplomatic sources, Moscow is now losing patience with Ankara, judging that it is not doing enough to expel the jihadists from the neutral zone.

The highly complex war in Syria, sparked by a bloody crackdown on protests demanding the country’s democratization, has claimed the lives of more than half a million people, turned millions more into internally displaced persons and refugees, and caused an economic and humanitarian crisis of enormous proportions.