Israel conducts over 300 airstrikes in Syria

Israel had conducted more than 300 airstrikes on Syria since the fall of president Bashar al-Assad, a war monitor said on Tuesday (December 10).

The raids had “destroyed the most important military sites” in the country, it added.

Now, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) has updated its figures, stating there have been around 310 Israeli airstrikes on Syrian territory since the fall of the Assad regime, BBC reports.

These strikes have hit defence factories, weapons and ammunition depots, airports, and scientific research centres. Locations include the outskirts of Damascus, the Qudsaya area in the Damascus countryside, and the Salamiyah countryside east of Hama, according to the SOHR.

Assad fled Syria as an Islamist-led rebel alliance swept into the capital Damascus, bringing to an end on Sunday (December 8) to five decades of brutal rule by his clan.

Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the Islamist leader who headed the offensive that forced Assad out, has begun talks on a transfer of power and vowed to pursue former senior government officials responsible for torture and war crimes.

His group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, is rooted in Syria’s branch of Al-Qaeda and is proscribed by many Western governments as a terrorist organisation, though it has sought to moderate its rhetoric.

The fall of Assad, whose clan had zero tolerance for dissent and who maintained a complex web of prisons and detention centres to keep Syrians from straying from the Baath party line, sparked celebrations around the country and in the diaspora all over the world.

Syria’s civil war killed 500,000 people and forced half the country to flee their homes, millions of them finding refuge abroad.

The country now faces profound uncertainty after the collapse of a government that had run every aspect of daily life in the image of Assad and his father, from whom the ousted president inherited power.

Israel has conducted hundreds of strikes on Syria since the civil war began in 2011 following Assad’s crackdown on a democracy movement.