Tag Archives: Air Strike

Air strikes kill at least 12, damage hospital in Syria’s Idlib: medics, monitor

Damaged vehicles and hospital are pictured at a site hit by overnight airstrike, in Kafr Takharim, northwest of Idlib city, Syria April 25, 2017. REUTERS/Ammar Abdullah

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Syrian or Russian air strikes killed more than a dozen people and severely damaged a hospital in and around a town in rebel-held Idlib province on Tuesday, local medical workers and a monitoring group said.

The attacks came as Syria’s air force and Russian jets intensified their bombardment of Idlib, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported.

Idlib is an insurgent stronghold, one of the few large areas still under rebel control in the west of the country. Rebels and their families who have chosen to leave areas under government siege around Damascus in evacuation deals have headed for Idlib.

A spokesman at the hospital in Kafr Takharim in Idlib told Reuters an air strike hit its courtyard killing 14 people, including patients.

The Observatory said there were no deaths from the hospital strike, but that the bombardment had put it out of action.

Separate air strikes southwest of Kafr Takharim killed at least 12 people including civilians and rebel fighters, the Observatory said.

(Reporting by Ammar Abdullah and John Davison; Editing by Alison Williams)

Stocks skid, safe-haven assets jump as U.S. missiles strike Syria

A woman monitors stock market prices inside a brokerage in New Taipei city, Taiwan

By Wayne Cole

SYDNEY (Reuters) – Safe-haven bonds and the yen jumped in Asia on Friday, while stocks fell after the United States launched cruise missiles against an air base in Syria, raising the risk of confrontation with Syrian backers Russia and Iran.

The U.S. dollar dropped three-quarters of a yen in currency markets, while sovereign bonds, gold and oil prices rallied hard.

MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan shed 0.7 percent in short order, and S&P 500 futures lost 0.5 percent in an unusually sharp move for Asian hours. Japan’s Nikkei was stripped of its early gains to slip 0.1 percent.

U.S. President Donald Trump ordered the strikes against a Syrian air base controlled by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in response to a deadly chemical attack in a rebel-held area, a U.S. official said.

Facing his biggest foreign policy crisis since taking office in January, Trump took the toughest direct U.S. action yet in Syria’s six-year-old civil war.

Investors had already been on edge as Trump met Chinese leader Xi Jinping for talks over flashpoints such as North Korea and China’s huge trade surplus with the United States.

“While President Trump had flagged a response to this week’s chemical attack in Syria, the swiftness of the response and the willingness to take action halfway through the Trump-Xi meeting caught markets a little off-guard,” said Sean Callow, senior currency strategist at Westpac in Sydney.

“There should be limited market follow-through, however, with no indication at this stage that this is the start of a broad-based, sustained U.S. military campaign.”

It was not yet clear if this strike would be the only one, though Secretary of State Rex Tillerson did say the attack was  “proportionate”.

The yen, a favored haven in times of stress due to Japan’s position as the world’s largest creditor nation, climbed across the board. The dollar fell to 110.30 from 110.95 just before news of the attacks hit dealing screens.

The dollar was otherwise unscathed, however, as it benefited from flows into safe-haven U.S. Treasuries. Against a basket of currencies it was barely lower, while the euro held steady at $1.0649.

Yields on 10-year Treasury debt fell five basis points to 2.29 percent, breaking a significant chart barrier at 2.30 percent for the first time this year.

Spot gold prices jumped 1.2 percent to $1,266.01 an ounce and touched their highest since Nov. 10.

“Clearly this raises the stakes, and we expect to see gold prices continuing to push higher in the short term, at least until there is some clarity around whether this is a one-off or develops into something more,” ANZ analyst Daniel Hynes said.

Oil also caught a bid on concerns the military intervention could affect supplies from the Middle East.

U.S. crude jumped 93 cents to $52.63 a barrel, the highest in a month, while Brent added 90 cents to $55.79.

(Reporting by Nichola Saminather; Additional reporting by Herbert Lash; Editing by Shri Navaratnam and Will Waterman)

Oil prices jump 2 percent after U.S. launches missile strike in Syria

Crude oil storage tanks are seen from above at the Cushing oil hub, appearing to run out of space to contain a historic supply glut that hammered prices, in Cushing, Oklahoma,

By Henning Gloystein

SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Oil prices surged more than 2 percent on Friday after the United States launched dozens of cruise missiles at an airbase in Syria.

U.S President Donald Trump said he had ordered missile strikes against a Syrian airfield from which a deadly chemical weapons attack was launched earlier this week, declaring he acted in America’s “national security interest” against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

After tepid trading before the news, Brent crude futures, the international benchmark for oil, jumped to $56.08 per barrel before easing to be up 1.6 percent at $55.75 per barrel at 0310 GMT.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures also climbed by over 2 percent, to a high of $52.94 a barrel before receding to be up 1.8 percent at $52.61.

Both benchmarks hit their highest levels since early March.

The strikes rattled global markets. While oil prices surged as traders priced in what has in the past been called a Middle East risk premium, and safe-haven products like gold jumped, stock markets and the U.S. dollar slumped.

“The U.S cruise missile strikes have seen crude oil jump over two percent in a straight line,” said Jeffrey Halley, senior market analyst at futures brokerage OANDA in Singapore.

Halley said the strikes had potentially big implications for oil markets.

“What will be the response of Iran and Russia, two of the world’s largest oil producers and staunch allies of the Assad regime?… We will have to wait for these answers as the day moves on,” he said.

U.S. officials said the military had fired 59 cruise missiles against a Syrian airbase controlled by Assad’s forces, in response to a poison gas attack on Tuesday in a rebel-held area.

Officials said the United States had informed Russia ahead of the strikes. The strikes did not target sections of the Syrian base where Russian forces were believed to be present.

(Reporting by Henning Gloystein; Editing by Kenneth Maxwell and Richard Pullin)

Attack on Syrian security forces in Homs kills dozens, prompts airstrikes

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Suicide bombers stormed two Syrian security offices in Homs on Saturday, killing dozens with gunfire and explosions including a senior officer and prompting airstrikes against the last rebel-held enclave in the western city.

The jihadist rebel alliance Tahrir al-Sham said in a social media post that five suicide bombers had carried out the attack, which it celebrated with the words “thanks be to God”, but stopped short of explicitly claiming responsibility.

Although the government of President Bashar al-Assad has controlled most of Homs since 2014, rebels still control its al-Waer district, which warplanes bombed on Saturday, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, wounding 50.

The attack comes as government and opposition delegations join peace talks in Geneva sponsored by the United Nations. Tahrir al-Sham opposes the talks and has fought with factions that are represented there.

Saturday’s jihadist assault in Homs began with clashes near a branch of military security in al-Mohata district and a branch of state security in al-Ghouta district before suicide bombers struck in both locations, state media reported.

The head of military security, General Hassan Daaboul, was killed along with 29 others in al-Mohata, while another 12 people were killed in al-Ghouta, the Observatory said. State media gave a lower figure of 32 people killed.

“Five suicide bombers attacked two branches of state security and military security in Homs… thanks be to God,” Tahrir al-Sham said in a statement on the Telegram social network.

Tahrir al-Sham was formed earlier this year from several groups including Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, which was formerly known as the Nusra Front and was al Qaeda’s Syrian branch until it broke formal allegiance to the global jihadist movement in 2016.

Since it was formed, Tahrir al-Sham has fought other rebel groups, including some that fight under the banner of the Free Syrian Army, as well as a faction linked to Islamic State, in northwest Syria. It was critical of FSA groups for taking part in peace talks.

(Reporting by John Davison and Angus McDowall; additional reporting by Ahmed Tolba in Cairo and Kinda Makieh in Damascus; editing by David Clarke and Ros Russell)

Plane strike hits Yemen mourners, killing 9 women, 1 child: residents

Yemen rubble after air strike that killed women and child

SANAA (Reuters) – Warplanes of the Saudi-led coalition struck a house north of Yemen’s capital where a crowd of mourners was gathered, residents said on Thursday, killing nine women and a child and injuring dozens.

The Saudi-led coalition said it was investigating reports of civilian casualties in the area.

The air strike hit the house of a local tribal leader in Ashira, a village north of Sanaa, on Wednesday night, a resident told Reuters. Mourners had gathered there to offer condolences after a woman died.

“People heard the sound of planes and started running from the house but then the bombs hit the house directly. The roof collapsed. Blood was everywhere,” a second resident of Ashira, who gave his name as Hamid Ali, told a Reuters cameraman.

Pictures published by local media showed tribesmen searching through the rubble of a destroyed house said to belong to Mohammed al-Nakaya, a tribal leader allied with Yemen’s Houthi movement.

One showed a man kneeling in the dust cradling the body of an elderly woman.

It was not immediately possible to verify the authenticity of the pictures.

“We are aware of media reports that Houthi rebels are claiming that Yemeni civilians were killed in an air raid overnight near Sanaa,” the coalition said in statement.

“There has been fighting between Yemeni armed forces and rebels in this area in recent days. We are investigating the reports.”

In October the alliance of mainly Gulf Arab states was heavily criticized after launching an air strike on a funeral gathering in Sanaa that killed 140 people, according to one U.N. estimate.

The death toll from that strike was one of the highest in any single incident since the alliance began military operations in March 2015 to try to restore the administration of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who the Houthis ousted.

The White House said at the time it might consider cutting its support to the Saudi-led campaign which has been providing air support for Hadi’s forces in a civil war that has killed more than 10,000 people and displaced millions.

The alliance, which says it does not target civilians, blamed the October funeral attack on incorrect information it said it received from the Yemeni military that armed Houthi leaders were in the area.

(Reporting by Mohammed Ghobari; Writing by Tom Finn and Sami Aboudi,; Editing by Toby Chopra and John Stonestreet)

Air strikes hit Syria’s rebel-held Idlib, around 30 dead: residents, monitor

people see debris of attack in Syria

AMMAN (Reuters) – At least 30 people died in air strikes on the rebel-held Syrian city of Idlib on Tuesday, in some of the heaviest raids there in months, witnesses and rescue workers said.

Around eight attacks by what witnesses believed to be Russian jets wounded scores of people and leveled several multi-storey buildings in residential areas of the northwestern city, they added.

Russia’s Defense Ministry later said media reports that its planes had bombed Idlib were not true, Interfax news agency reported.

Two rescue workers said the death toll was at least 30. The U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 26 people were killed and casualties were expected to rise as rescue workers searched for bodies under the rubble.

Video footage by activists on social media showed civilians, including young children, being treated in a main city hospital where the injured had been rushed for treatment.

“We are still pulling bodies from the rubble,” said Issam al Idlibi, a volunteer civil defense worker.

The extent of the damage and the debris bore the hallmarks of a Russian attack, two witnesses said.

Russian planes have targeted a number of towns and villages in the area since entering the Syrian conflict in September 2015 to back ally President Bashar al-Assad.

But activists and residents also said there had been a reduction of Russian strikes in Idlib province since a Turkish-Russian brokered cessation of hostilities late December.

Planes from the U.S.-led coalition have also launched a number of attacks in the rural province, a major stronghold of jihadists, many of them formerly affiliated to al Qaeda.

Idlib’s population has been swollen by thousands of Syrian fighters and their families evacuated from villages and towns around Damascus and Aleppo city, which was retaken by the government in recent months.

Separately, at least four people were killed in air strikes by unknown jets in the town of Arbin in rebel-held Eastern Ghouta, northeast of the capital. The Syrian army and pro-government militias have been seeking in recent days to gain new ground there.

(Reporting by Suleiman Al-Khalidi; Editing by Tom Heneghan)

Rocket from Gaza draws Israeli air strikes, one person wounded

Palestinians run from air strike

GAZA (Reuters) – A Palestinian rocket launched from Gaza struck Israel on Monday, causing no casualties or damage, in a rare attack that drew Israeli air strikes against Palestinian militant targets.

A 70-year-old Palestinian man was slightly wounded in one of the Israeli strikes, health workers said, identifying him as a passerby. He was the only reported casualty on either side of a frontier that has been largely quiet in recent months.

“In response to the projectile fired towards southern Israeli communities earlier today, the air force targeted three Hamas posts in the northern Gaza Strip,” the Israeli military said in a statement, cautioning it “will not tolerate rocket fire towards civilians”.

Gaza residents said an armed training camp, a security compound and an observation post belonging to Hamas were hit.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the Palestinian rocket strike.

Israel has said that Hamas, the Islamist militant group that rules the Gaza Strip, bears overall responsibility for what happens in the enclave.

Hamas has observed a de-facto ceasefire with Israel since a 2014 war but small armed cells of Jihadist Salafis have defied the agreement and have continued to occasionally launch rockets at Israel. When those attacks occur, Hamas usually orders its fighters to vacate potential targets for Israeli retaliation.

(Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi and Jeffrey Heller; Writing by Jeffrey Heller; editing by Ralph Boulton)

Deaths from Nigerian refugee camp air strike rises to 90, could reach 170: MSF

people walk at the site of a bombing attack

GENEVA (Reuters) – The death toll from an accidental Nigerian air strike on a refugee camp in the town of Rann has risen to around 90 people, and could be as high as 170, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said in a statement on Friday.

Tuesday’s strike on the northeastern town in Borno state, which had Boko Haram militants as its target, has led to an investigation by the Nigerian Air Force (NAF). The inquiry’s report is due to be submitted no later than Feb. 2.

The aid group, also known as Doctors Without Borders, said the higher figure of 170 comes from reports from residents and community leaders.

“This figure needs to be confirmed,” said Bruno Jochum, MSF General Director, in the statement.

“The victims of this horrifying event deserve a transparent account of what happened and the circumstances in which this attack took place.”

Borno is the epicenter of Boko Haram’s seven-year-long attempt to create an Islamic caliphate in the northeast. The insurgency has killed more than 15,000 people since 2009 and forced some two million to flee their homes, many of whom have moved to camps for internally displaced people.

“A Nigerian airforce plane circled twice and dropped two bombs in the middle of the town of Rann, which hosts thousands of internally displaced people,” MSF said.

“At the time of the attack, an aid distribution was taking place.”

On Thursday, Human Rights Watch said the strike had destroyed 35 structures, and hit 100 meters from what appears to be a Nigerian military compound, raising questions about why precautions were not taken to avoid harming civilians.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Writing by Paul Carsten; editing by Ralph Boulton)

At least 76 killed in air strike on Nigerian refugee camp: ICRC

Aftermath of bombing of refugee camp in Nigeria

GENEVA (Reuters) – At least 76 people were killed in Tuesday’s accidental Nigerian Air Force strike on a refugee camp and more than 100 were wounded, the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement (ICRC) said on Wednesday.

The air force has said an unknown number of civilians were killed and wounded in the mistaken strike in Rann, Borno state. The state has been the epicentre of Boko Haram’s seven-year-long attempt to create an Islamic caliphate in the northeast.

The air force has said civilians were accidentally killed and wounded in the attack, which was aimed at the jihadist group, but neither it nor the government has provided an official figure for the number of casualties. Aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has said 52 were killed and 120 were wounded.

ICRC said six Nigeria Red Cross members were killed and 13 wounded. “In addition to aid staff, it is estimated that 70 people have been killed and more than a hundred wounded,” it said in a statement.

Lai Mohammed, the information minister, said “the accidental bombing is not a true reflection of the level of professionalism” he had witnessed in the air force.

The strike followed a military offensive against Boko Haram in the last few weeks.

The group’s insurgency has killed more than 15,000 people since 2009 and forced some two million to flee their homes, many of whom have moved to camps for internally displaced people.

(Reporting by Tom Miles; additional reporting by Felix Onuah; Writing by Alexis Akwagyiram; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)

Nigerian air force kills 50 in air strike on refugee camp

Injured people are comforted at the site after a bombing attack of an internally displaced persons camp in Rann, Nigeria

By Lanre Ola

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (Reuters) – Nigeria’s air force killed 50 people and injured 120 in an air strike on a refugee camp in the northeast on Tuesday, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said. The military said the strike had targeted Boko Haram.

MSF said the strike occurred in Rann in Borno state, the epicenter of the jihadist group’s seven-year-old bid to create an Islamic caliphate. Regional military commander General Lucky Irabor located it at Kala Balge, a district including Rann.

Irabor, who said it was too early to determine the cause of the mistake, told journalists an unknown number of civilians had been killed, adding that humanitarian workers from MSF and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) were injured.

“MSF teams have seen 120 wounded and 50 dead following the bombing,” said Charlotte Morris, a spokeswoman for the medical charity. “Our medical and surgical teams in Cameroon and Chad are ready to treat wounded patients. We are in close contact with our teams, who are in shock following the event.”

A spokeswoman for ICRC said six Nigerian Red Cross members were killed and 13 were wounded.

People walk at the site after a bombing attack of an internally displaced persons camp in Rann, Nigeria

People walk at the site after a bombing attack of an internally displaced persons camp in Rann, Nigeria January 17, 2017. MSF/Handout via Reuters

The insurgency has killed more than 15,000 people and forced two million to flee their homes, many of whom have moved to camps because it has been too dangerous to return home.

The air strike came amid an offensive against Boko Haram by Nigeria’s military over the last few weeks. President Muhammadu Buhari said last month a key camp in the jihadist group’s Sambisa forest base in Borno state had fallen.

A statement issued by the presidency said the air strike was a “regrettable operational mistake” that happened during the “final phase of mopping up insurgents in the northeast”.

Boko Haram has stepped up attacks in the last few weeks as the end of the rainy season has enabled its fighters to move more easily in the bush.

A video featuring an audio recording purporting to be Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau, which was posted on social media late on Monday, said the group was behind twin suicide bombings at a university earlier that day which killed two people and injured 17 others.

(Additional reporting by Alexis Akwagyiram and Kieran Guilbert; Editing by Tom Heneghan)