Olive-picking children killed in latest Syria shelling

Turkey launches its first major ground assault into Syria since the country's civil war began. Syrian government forces’ shelling of a northwestern village killed at least nine people, including six children, as they picked olives, opposition activists have said.

Syrian government forces’ shelling of a north-western village killed at least nine people, including six children, as they picked olives, opposition activists have said.

The shelling of the village of Qawqafeen, in the province of Idlib, is the latest violation of a truce reached in March 2020 between Russia and Turkey, who back rival sides in Syria’s 12-year conflict that has killed half a million people.

Hundreds of people have been killed or wounded over the past few years in violation of the truce that ended a months-long Russian-backed government offensive on Idlib, the last major rebel stronghold in Syria.

The shelling of the farm was reported by the Britain-based opposition war monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the opposition’s Syrian Civil Defence, also known as the White Helmets.

The White Helmets said it treated one woman who was wounded and handed over the bodies of the dead to their families.

Idlib is home to more than four million people, many of them internally displaced by Syria’s conflict that broke out in March 2011.

The war displaced half the country’s pre-war population of 23 million and left large parts of Syria destroyed.