UN report says Russia and Turkey may have committed war crimes in Syria

United Nations investigators said in a report issued on March 3 found that the actions by the armed forces of both Russia and Turkey in Syria could amount to war crimes.
Covering the period from July 2019 to February 2020, the UN panel found that Russia killed dozens of civilians during multiple air raids on a popular market and a camp for displaced people on July 22, 2020. The attack on the market killed at least 43 civilians and the August 2020 airstrike on the camp killed at least 20 others.
“In both incidents, the Russian Air Force did not direct the attacks at a specific military objective. This amounts to a war crime for having launched indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas,” the report said.
The investigators, led by Paulo Pinheiro, denounced the “deliberate” attacks carried out by the Syrian government and its allies Russia and Iran on protected civilian sites, including hospitals and schools.
“There is a war crime of intentionally terrorising a population to force it to move. We are seeing that picture emerging very clearly in Idlib, where, because these places are being bombed, people are having to move out,” the said in its report.
The investigators also said that Syrian rebels allied with Turkey had carried out war crimes during the invasion of Kurdish areas in northern Syria and that al Qaeda-linked rebels had inflicted scores of civilian casualties in rocket attacks on government-held areas.
“The Commission finds that there are reasonable grounds to believe that Syrian National Army fighters perpetrated the war crime of murder”, the report said, warning that “if any armed group members were shown to be acting under the effective command and control of Turkish forces, these violations may entail criminal responsibility for such commanders who knew or should have known about the crimes”.
The UN panel called on Turkey to investigate whether it was responsible for an air raid on a civilian convoy near Ras al-Ain that killed 11 people last October. The UK-based war monitor, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said the attack was conducted by Turkish aircraft.
Turkey has denied the allegations.