AMMAN: Across Syria, civilians living under the constant threat of airstrikes look to the sky anxiously.
Last month alone, aerial attacks killed 745 Syrian civilians, the Violations Documentation Center in Syria reported, making them the leading cause of civilian deaths.
The regime’s barrel bombs, the indiscriminate and brutally effective weapons filled with explosives and pieces of shrapnel dropped on civilian areas from regime helicopters, have killed more than 11,000 Syrians nationwide since 2012.
Meanwhile, the US-led international coalition began airstrikes in Syria last fall ostensibly targeting the Islamic State. These airstrikes too have claimed dozens of civilian lives.
Week after week, air raids consistently rank among the leading causes of death for Syrian civilians, with no end in sight. Civilians caught between fighting among rebels, the Islamic State and regime forces have nowhere to hide when bombs rain from the sky. In at least one town in Syria’s north, residents are calling for rebels to focus more on capturing airports to put an end to the hundreds of air raids carried out every month across rebel-held parts of the country.
Attacks from the air are becoming so common that civilians “can differentiate the planes by their sound, which they have become used to hearing daily,” Sham A-Deen Abu Shahba, an eyewitness to coalition airstrikes in Idlib, told Syria Direct in a recent interview. Syrians can now tell whether planes are regime or coalition aircraft, Abu Shahba said.