BEIRUT // Government air raids in a northwestern town in Syria and a subsequent crash by a Syrian warplane that slammed into a residential area there killed at least 17 people on Monday, activists said.
The raids on the town of Ariha came amid intense clashes between government forces and insurgents in the northwestern province of Idlib and the central region of Hama. The town, once a government stronghold, was captured by opposition fighters and Islamic militants in May. Government forces have suffered setbacks in Idlib province since March, including the loss of the provincial capital of the same name.
An activist group known as the Local Coordination Committees said the warplane crashed in a busy market, adding that it was not immediately clear whether it was shot down. The LCC said 27 people were killed and many others were wounded.
Rami Abdurrahman, who heads another activist group, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said the plane crashed in the town centre, destroying several homes and killing at least 17 people. He said some 70 people were also wounded.
The Ariha Today Facebook page posted a photo showing at least seven buildings reduced to rubble on a narrow street. It said 27 people were killed but that 12 of them have not been identified yet. The group also listed 55 wounded, including nine women.
The Observatory and the LCC said that at the time of the crash, the town was under attack by Syrian President Bashar Al Assad’s air force.
An amateur video posted online by activists showed several damaged buildings, as well as parts of the plane that crashed. Syria’s civil war began in March 2011. UN chief Ban Ki-moon said last week that at least 250,000 Syrians have been killed in the conflict so far.
* Associated Press
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Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
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Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
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