Both Sides Committed War Crimes in Syria, U.N. Investigators Say
By NICK CUMMING-BRUCEMARCH 1, 2017
GENEVA — The Syrian Air Force deliberately bombed a United Nations humanitarian aid convoy in September in what appeared to be a "meticulously planned" attack
that amounted to a war crime, United Nations investigators said on Wednesday in a report detailing a range of war crimes committed by forces on both sides of the conflict.
The attack on the convoy, which killed 14 aid workers
and stoked international outrage, was "one of the most egregious" in a five-month government offensive to take full control of Aleppo, the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Syria said in the report, which it planned to present this month to the Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Armed opposition groups also committed war crimes by indiscriminately shelling residential areas of government-held Aleppo with inaccurate, improvised mortars, killing dozens of civilians, including women and children, the report said, adding
that the rebels had also committed abuses against civilians in the areas they controlled.
The Syrian Air Force carried out strikes on eastern Aleppo using chlorine bombs throughout 2016, the commission reported,
but its investigators said they had received "an alarming number" of accusations of the use of the chemical after September, as the battle for Aleppo intensified.
As pro-government forces moved into eastern Aleppo in the closing stages of their offensive, some forces carried out summary executions, including reprisals in which Syrian soldiers killed family members who had supported rebel groups, the commission said,
but it did not find evidence of a massacre or of widespread killings.
But the panel’s researchers found no information to support suggestions
that Russia had used chemical weapons, and they did not receive sufficiently clear evidence to tie Russian forces to the war crimes detailed in the report.