BEIRUT – A new wave of airstrikes
targeting the Syrian city of Raqqa, the headquarters of the extremist
Islamic State group and the focus of an international military campaign,
killed at least eight people, including five children, Syrian
opposition groups said Friday.
The strikes came as France's foreign minister, Laurent Fabius,
declared that destroying the ISIS headquarters and "neutralizing and
eradicating" the extremist group is the main objective of the
international campaign.
It wasn't immediately clear who carried out the latest airstrikes.
The city in northeastern Syria is the group's de facto capital and has
become the focus of international airstrikes in the wake of the Paris
terror attacks and the bombing of a Russian jetliner over Egypt's Sinai
Peninsula. ISIS has said it was behind both the Paris attacks and the
downing of the Russian passenger plane.
A Raqqa-based activist group that reports on ISIS, known as Raqqa is
Being Slaughtered Silently, said Friday that most of the casualties in
the latest aerial bombardment occurred when warplanes targeted the
city's Heten School. The school, like others in Raqqa, has been taken
over by ISIS.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put the death toll at 12,
including the five children. Conflicting casualty figures are common in
the chaos of Syria's civil war, now in its fifth year.
Russia and a U.S.-led coalition that includes France have been pounding Raqqa.
An IS-affiliated agency, Aamaq, published a video purporting to show
nighttime explosions that lit up the Raqqa sky. The video showed a
building and several cars on fire, and a man crouching over the bodies
of five children. The agency claimed the casualties and destruction were
caused by Russian airstrikes that targeted civilian areas.
In an interview with RTL radio, Fabius said that destroying Daesh is
an objective that all countries agree upon, referring to ISIS by its
Arabic acronym. He spoke after a week of intense diplomacy capped by the
French president's meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Francois Hollande has been on a diplomatic drive since the Paris
attacks to increase cooperation in tackling ISIS, which holds large
swathes of territory in both Syria and Iraq. The extremist group claimed
responsibility for the downing of a Russian passenger plane over Egypt,
when all 224 people onboard were killed, as well as the Nov. 13 attacks
in Paris that killed 130 people.
Fabius said Putin agreed on the need to focus international efforts
against the extremist group and that France is drawing up a map of
other, moderate groups, to protect them from warplanes.
He also said the international coalition is focusing on oil convoys
from the group's territory, which provide a crucial source of income. He
said some of the trucks head toward Turkey, and France believes Syrian
leader Bashar Assad is also a buyer — a charge the Syrian government has
denied.
