France says Syria or Russia to blame for bombing of school

French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said either Russia or the Syrian government were responsible for an air strike on Syria’s Idlib province that led to deaths of 26 civilians, most of them schoolchildren.

“Who is responsible? In any case it is not the opposition because you need planes to launch bombs. It’s either the Syrians - the regime of (President Bashar) al-Assad - or the Russians,” Ayrault told a news conference.

“It’s yet another demonstration of the horror of this war, which is a war against the Syrian people, which we cannot accept.”

Russia’s foreign ministry said earlier on Thursday that Moscow was not responsible for the attack on Idlib.

Unicef, the United Nations Children’s Fund, said the assault in Idlib province may have been the deadliest on a school since the Syria war began more than five years ago. Twenty-two children and six teachers were killed in the strikes, Unicef said.

Other estimates, including witnesses quoted by Agence France-Presse, said at least 35 civilians died.

“This is a tragedy, it is an outrage, and if deliberate it is a war crime,” Anthony Lake, the executive director of Unicef, said in a statement.

“When will the world’s revulsion at such barbarity be matched by insistence that this must stop?”

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group, said warplanes it identified as either Syrian or Russian made at least six strikes on the village of Haas, including on the school compound.

The White Helmets, a civil defense group, posted photographs of obliterated buildings on Twitter, and said that at least seven airstrikes had hit a three-school complex in Haas.

The targeted area in Idlib is controlled by an alliance of rebel groups opposed to Assad. It has frequently been bombed by Assad’s air force and its Russian ally, which intervened to help him more than a year ago.

Reports in the state-run Syrian media said militants had been targeted by government forces in Haas, but there was no mention of a school assault.

At the United Nations, the Russian ambassador, Vitaly I. Churkin, said he knew nothing about the assault.

“It’s horrible, I hope we were not involved,” he said.

Russia and Syria have been increasingly assailed by the United States and other supporters of the Syrian opposition for what they call indiscriminate bombings that kill civilians in the conflict.

Assad and his supporters say they are targeting terrorists. Estimates of civilian deaths since the conflict began in March 2011 range from 300,000 to 470,000. Roughly half the country’s population has been displaced.

- Reuters, New York Times