The head of the United Nations’ children’s agency, UNICEF, called for a stop to attacks like Wednesday’s fatal strike on a Syrian school, which killed at least 15 children and one teacher.
“This is a tragedy. It is an outrage. And if deliberate, it is a war crime,” Anthony Lake, UNICEF’s executive director, said in a statement. “Children lost forever to their families … teachers lost forever to their students … one more scar on Syria’s future. When will the world’s revulsion at such barbarity be matched by insistence that this must stop?”
Lake added the attack “may be the deadliest attack on a school since the war began more than five years ago.”
At least 26 people, most of them children, were killed on Wednesday in airstrikes by either Syrian or Russian war planes on a village in the rebel-held Idlib province.
The attacks struck a residential area and a school in Haas village, according to a Facebook post by the Syrian Civil Defense rescue workers’ network.
Russia has backed the Syrian regime, overseen by President Bashar Assad, in its war against the rebels. Initially, a Syrian state TV network reported a number of militants had been hit.
“It’s horrible, I hope we were not involved. It’s the easiest thing for me to say no, but I’m a responsible person, so I need to see what my Ministry of Defense is going to say,” Russia’s Ambassador to the United Nations Vitaly Churkin told Reuters.
