Syrian state media said Tuesday the Syrian military shot down a U.S. drone conducting a surveillance mission.
The SANA news agency gave no details on the alleged incident in Latakia province, along the Mediterranean coast. A U.S. official says contact was lost with a drone over Syria, but gave no other information.
If the report is true, it would be the first U.S. aircraft shot down over Syria since a U.S.-led coalition battling Islamic State in Iraq expanded airstrikes into Syria in September.
Earlier on Tuesday, Amnesty International released a new report saying Syrian forces killed civilians in airstrikes on the northern town of Raqqa last November in attacks that violated human rights law.
The report presents accounts of airstrikes on separate days that killed 115 civilians, including 14 children.
Amnesty spoke by phone or Skype with witnesses to the attacks and local activists. They described airstrikes that hit areas that had no military targets nearby or ones where civilians were killed in places where Islamic State militants were known or likely to be.
Amnesty said those attacks amount to either direct attacks against civilians, indiscriminate bombings or disproportionate strikes — all of which are barred under international human rights law.
Raqqa is a stronghold of the Islamic State group, but Amnesty said that does not give the government a reason to bomb the city as if the area were populated solely by the militants.
“Syrian government forces have shown flagrant disregard for the rules of war in these ruthless airstrikes,” Amnesty’s Philip Luther said. “Some of these attacks give every indication of being war crimes.
“They have carried out repeated attacks on civilian areas without clearly identifying military targets, a blatant violation of the requirement to distinguish between civilians and military targets,” he added.
Also Tuesday, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights accused Syrian government forces of dropping barrel bombs filled with poison gas on the town of Sarmin in Idlib province, killing six people and injuring dozens more.
The government denied the reports.
Source-VOA
