At least 25 people have been killed after a Syrian army fighter jet crashed into a busy market place in the rebel-held northwestern town of Ariha on Monday, August 3.
According to the UK-based Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks violence across Syria, most of the dead were civilians on the ground in the town within Idlib province, which fell to a coalition of Islamist insurgents in May.
The observatory report says scores were also injured from the crash, which occurred when the town was under attack by the air force of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad.
The Guardian reports that there was no immediate reaction from the Syrian army.
Ariha is said to have been one of the last government strongholds in Idlib before it was captured in May by opposition fighters and Islamic militants. The fall of Ariha left most of Idlib province, bordering Turkey, in rebel hands.
Most of the dead are said to be civilians on the ground.
In January officials reported that at least 35 soldiers had been killed in a cargo plane crash in Idlib province.
State media blamed that the crash on “weather conditions and heavy fog” but al-Nusra rebels, linked to al-Qaeda, said they had shot it down.
Syria’s civil war began in March 2011. The United Nations says more than 220,000 people have been killed and at least a million wounded in the war.
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